It's certainly true that everything we do involves *some* risk.People *do* slip and fall in the shower,suffer a subdural hematoma (which often requires an ER physician to drill a hole in your skull within minutes of arrival) and,all too often,die.When calculating "risk to reward" for various activities a flight on a 747 for a vacation in Italy,certainly not *completely* devoid of serious risk,beats doing 139mph on I-95 in Connecticut in *my* book.Beats it by a country mile in fact.I travel I-95 between Greater Boston and NYC regularly and I promise you that doing so at 70mph should cause a reasonable person at least a bit of anxiety.
Any time you wish to hear war stories from the ER of a large hospital that involve unwise behavior (as opposed to heart attack,stroke and cancer patients) let me know.I've got a million of 'em.
Interestingly, I was on a jury for a four week civil case in King County superior court involving a two year old that fell from the top of an 8’ slide onto asphalt in a Seattle park and suffered a subdural hematoma. They actually had a professional medical artist create custom three foot square paintings of the child’s head and what had happened. They removed something like a four inch square section of his skull to work on it. Other than the scarring in the kid’s hair area he was fine, though. The fall had happened about six years before we were hearing the case. This was in the mid-80’s.
I learned a lot in those four weeks. Oh, and the city won. Parents need to watch their kids.
And it’s why I will never do stupid activities so popular the last few decades such as bungee, sky diving, and the like. Stupid is as stupid does.
I confess that when I think of all this acceptance of risk to do fun stuff all sorts of things come to mind, like Christopher Reeve.