A million ways to meet your Maker

If there are fifty ways to leave your lover, there are a million ways to meet your Maker. Some are common, some rare.

Many years ago I cut an article out of the newspaper reporting a freak accident in Page, Arizona. James and Adalene Beckwith were placidly motoring along, parallel to the shore of Lake Powell in their 21-foot cabin cruiser. Just as they passed beneath an overhanging cliff, “a huge chunk of sandstone” broke loose and smashed into the boat. What were the chances of that? Adalene was taken to Page Hospital with critical injuries, while James sunk to the bottom of the lake. At the time of the article’s publication his body had not yet been recovered.

A distant relative of mine, also a gastroenterologist, was in good health when he experienced an episode of viral gastroenteritis. While sitting on his sofa reading, he suddenly vomited, aspirated, and died.

Although it remains uncertain, a single person in recorded history is thought to have been killed after being struck by a meteorite. The victim was a 40-year-old bus driver named Kamaraj, who was standing on the grounds of a college in Tamil Nadu, at the southern tip of India. The fateful meteorite apparently had Kamaraj in its sights when it formed somewhere in space millions of years ago: at that point it began its extended trip through the universe that ended by destroying the bus driver’s life on February 6th, 2016. This was of course an extraordinarily unlikely event, but the unfortunate Kamaraj was just as dead as if he had crashed his bus (odds of death in a motor vehicle accident are about 1 in 106).

It is estimated that several thousand people die of lightning strikes each year. This translates to a lifetime risk of death by lightening of about 1 in 180,000. So I guess it’s more likely that you’ll be taken by lightning than win the lottery, but don’t count on either happening. For perspective, the chances of your life ending by a fall are 1 in 111.

Sadly, freak occurrences sometimes affect not just one, but many. I went to Haiti with a medical team a few months after the 2010 earthquake that killed an incomprehensible 230,000 people. During our outdoor clinics I heard horrific stories of people who, through a long chain of circumstances, found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The sister of a friend of a Haitian physician I worked with needed a single credit to complete her nursing degree. She chose a course that met in a particularly poorly constructed building. Even though she had been assigned a seat right next to the door, the first shock wave was so strong that it instantly brought the structure down. Her brother found her body half in and half out of the doorway, buried in debris. So sad!

On a somewhat more optimistic note, chance events can also lead to one being spared death by a whisker. The cousin of the same physician was supposed to begin college on the day the earthquake struck. The first class met in a building in Port-au-Prince. But much to his chagrin, he’d been distracted, and missed the registration deadline. Thus, he wasn’t permitted to attend any courses. This lapse saved his life—the building where the college classes took place was completely destroyed. All eight floors were smashed together in a terrible pancake stacked crazily on the ground, killing every student.

Freak boating accidents can be deadly, as was the case in Lake Powell, butcan also unexpectedly spare lives. Twenty-five years ago some friends of ours were becalmed in their 35-foot sailboat, far out at sea. A crew member pointed out a power boat way in the distance. No one thought much about it, even as it got progressively closer—everyone was sure it would alter course. But it kept coming, at full speed. Those aboard the sailboat began to get concerned. Several waved their arms, increasingly frantically, to get the attention of the pilot. Disconcertingly, the boat didn’t alter its speed or its course, but seemed to have a bead on our friends. Finally, it rammed into the sail boat at about 30 mph, ripping a four-foot hole in its side. The Bayliner’s bow went up onto the sailboat’s deck with such force that the mast broke, and the steel rigging snapped. Two crew were thrown into the water, and several others were knocked down on the foredeck, where they could see the bottom of the Bayliner looming above them. One crew member narrowly escaped decapitation by a whipping shroud. Miraculously, despite some extensive bruises, no one was seriously hurt. How could this horrible collision have happened? It turned out that the inexperienced skipper of the Bayliner had locked the wheel and gone below deck “for a few minutes.”

So, extremely unlikely events can cause fatalities and, thankfully, be occasionally associated with miraculous escapes. This leads to contemplation of the multitude of near-misses each of us inevitably experiences in the course of our lives without even being aware of them: the truck driver who suddenly jerks awake just before his rig drifts over into oncoming traffic; the little colony of staphylococcus growing on the aortic valve that are fortuitously destroyed by white blood cells just in time to prevent the development of fatal endocarditis; the shooter with a trunkful of guns heading for the movie theater whose car wouldn’t start.

In my first year of medical school, during a lecture on the menstrual cycle, the Ob-Gyn professor marveled at the incredible complexity of the hormonal symphony necessary to trigger ovulation each month. “What’s amazing,” he said, “is not all the things that can go wrong to interfere with ovulation. It’s that women ever manage to get pregnant at all.” I take his point a step further and express my amazement that any person is ever able to survive past childhood. There are a million ways to meet your maker–life is precious and fragile. Please be careful, everybody!