I shouldn’t be alive… and yet here I am
By: Dr. Ismael Perdomo Medical Doctor – Pediatrician – Epidemiologist At 45 years of age, a question arose that seemed simple on the surface but ended up transforming the way I see existence: ¿what has been the cumulative probability of my death up to today? . Until that moment, I had devoted my professional life to evaluating other people’s risks: in specific patients, in vulnerable populations, in infant mortality curves, and in epidemiological models. I had never considered myself a statistical case worthy of study. And yet something clicked. If life is so fragile, if so many things can go wrong at any second, why am I still here? As a pediatrician, I have accompanied the beginning of life and witnessed its extreme vulnerability; as an epidemiologist, I know that survival can be represented as a mathematical function and that intuition fails us when it faces small probabilities and chained events; as a person, I have come to understand that my existence defies any simple calcu...