From the desk of Willie Delwiche.
It was a voicemail that any parent would dread…
Hello, this is the nurse from camp. Your son had an accident. He’s fine but I need to talk to you…
I quickly called back to get the details. I was on the road just a few minutes later, making a nighttime trip to a rural emergency room 100 miles away. As it turns out, my son suffered a broken arm during a relatively run-of-the-mill game of chase that involved jumping across a small ditch and not quite sticking the landing. He was doing what we sent him to camp to do.
A couple of hours alone in the car gave me plenty of time to think about all types of risks and how they are unevenly distributed across both space and time. Accidents can really happen anywhere. Still, we have nurses at summer camps, not in our living rooms. Broken arms and other more minor injuries are more likely at the former than the later.