I swear, I'm trying to keep it together but my body is conspiring against me

McKeany narrates his vasectomy day in real time — the unexpectedly friendly nurse, the lighthearted text exchange with his wife Allison from the procedure table, her decision to come in and watch (she once drove home from college to see her brother's C-section), and the surgeon working through small bursts of incomplete numbing. It expands into a meditation on his and Allison's family-planning arc, the decision after their daughter Em's severe cerebral palsy diagnosis, and the strange comedy of inhabiting a body that keeps breaking down.