Look, I’m not saying Michael isn’t the brightest guy in the world, but when a brain-eating amoeba took up residence in his head and starved to death, well… that kind of speaks for itself.
It all started during one of his “genius” ideas—this time, a summer trip to a lake that was, in his words, “totally fine, bro, don’t be soft.” The water was murky, smelled vaguely of algae and regret, and had a sign that read: “Warning: Unsafe Water. Swim at Your Own Risk.”
Naturally, Michael saw this as a challenge.
“Signs like that are just to scare off weak people,” he scoffed, wading in up to his waist.
To be fair, the rest of us hesitated, but Michael? He cannonballed right into the most questionable part of the lake, where the water looked more like soup than something humans should be swimming in. He came up spluttering, grinning like he had just conquered nature itself.
Fast forward three days.
Michael started getting headaches. At first, he brushed it off. “Just dehydration,” he claimed, despite chugging enough Gatorade to drown a small animal. Then came the dizziness. Then the confusion. By the time he tried putting his socks on his hands and calling them “sock gloves,” we knew something was up.
A quick trip to the hospital later, the doctor gave us the news. “It appears he has Naegleria fowleri,” he said. Blank stares. “A brain-eating amoeba.”
Now, you’d think this would send Michael into a panic. Nope. He just blinked. “Wait… so you’re saying there’s something in my brain eating it?”
“Yes.”
Michael thought about it for a second, then smirked. “Joke’s on the amoeba. There’s nothing to eat.”
The doctor was not amused.
We braced ourselves for the worst, expecting Michael to start deteriorating, but strangely, nothing happened. No worsening symptoms. No cognitive decline (well, no new decline). Just… nothing. A week later, he was still walking around, completely fine, while the doctors scratched their heads.
And then came the test results.
The amoeba, the literal brain-eating organism, was dead. Cause of death? Starvation.
Michael was overjoyed. “I told you, bro. Survival of the fittest.”
The rest of us, however, had a much darker realization: That little microscopic creature, designed by nature to consume brain matter, took one look at Michael’s and gave up.
After that, Michael became somewhat of a legend. “The Man Who Outsmarted a Brain-Eating Amoeba” was a phrase thrown around, though those of us who actually knew him had a different take—“The Guy Who Was So Dumb Even an Amoeba Tapped Out.”
To this day, Michael wears it as a badge of honor. “I survived a brain-eating amoeba,” he brags at parties. And every time, someone mutters under their breath, “Yeah, but at what cost?”
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