When the nurse came to start my blood transfusion, she handed me a piece of paper to sign. It had a lot of words on it, and I told her I couldn’t read them without my glasses.

“Oh, it’s like everything else you sign in here,” she said in the cheerful, comforting, matter of fact manner perfected by the English. “It will probably be fine, but you might die.” I smiled, and picked up the pen. I needed the blood.

I like to be informed. I want the mechanic who works on my car to explain what is wrong and what he is going to do about it, I will raptly listen to a plumber outline the necessity of directional tees and banded lifts and I once answered the phone before 8:00 in the morning to further my education regarding the appropriate ratio of mulch to manure to spread on my garden beds. I don't even talk to my children before 8:00.

So naturally, when I needed a physician, I chose an explainer. At our first meeting, he walked me through my diagnosis and options with impressive detail, and I still went home and spent the night on line reading everything I could find. 

But during my pre-op appointment, a week before surgery, I discovered a whole new world of information: statistics regarding what could go wrong. To name just a few, I had a .2% chance of developing a blood clot, a 3% chance of the surgery failing to cure my pain, a .5% chance of needing a blood transfusion, a 1% chance of developing an infection and a .2% chance of dying or having a brain seizure from the anesthetic.

These numbers are made up, because I didn't retain them. Although impressive in sheer quantity, they didn’t really faze me. I had decided to go through with it for the same reason I board airplanes. I want to go places on the other side of oceans.

As it turned out, the only statistic I was on the unfortunate end of was the blood transfusion. But ever since that afternoon, listening to the numbers roll off his tongue, I have been thinking about risk, and the way we are all in danger of dying from the moment we are born.

When I get in my car to drive to Seattle, a distance of about 30 miles, I might have, say, a .7% chance of getting in an accident and a .01% chance of it being fatal. When I eat my salmon, I might have a .2% chance of choking on a bone. When I stand on a step-stool to change a light bulb, there is probably a .08% chance of my stepping off and spraining my ankle.

When you have surgery, you have to sign quite a few pieces of paper acknowledging the possibility of unintended consequences. The act of doing this forced me, at least for a moment, to formally agree to the deal we are all born into: bad things can happen at any time.

One morning, when I was pregnant with my second child, I had a thought that literally took my breath away. I was going to bring another being into the world whose wellbeing I would be tied to for the rest of my life. There would be two people walking around with the possibility of causing me a devastation so terrifying I had to sit down at the thought. You don’t know that when you get pregnant with your first - if you think about risk at all, it is the finite risk of complications during pregnancy, or birth anomalies. You don’t see the desert of danger stretching out before you, shimmering into an invisible horizon.

Mostly, I have lived with the things I fear most by veering between denial and anxiety. But after signing all those official documents giving people permission to do things that might cause me harm, I feel less frightened by the ever-present possibility of pain and sorrow. I’ve taken down a few trees and made a small clearing, because camouflage doesn’t offer any protection. I might as well stand in the center of my life.