Drop Dead Healthy

The Skull

The Quest to Not Be Killed in an Accident

I JUST SPENT A TRULY harrowing half hour reading the CDC’s index of ways you can die and get injured. It’s a mind-blowing document. Thousands of categories. They list the classics, like car accidents, of course. But also balloon, snowmobile, and animal-drawn vehicle accidents. They list dog bites, but also unpleasant contact with sea lions, macaws, and giraffes. There’s accidental gunshots, but also rogue sewing machines and can openers.

It all makes you want to curl up in your bed. Except that your bed could kill you in any number of ways.

• entanglement in bed linen, causing suffocation (category T71)

• falling while climbing into bed (W13.0)

• burns from highly flammable sheets, spreads, pillows, or mattress (X05)

• drowning involving bed (W17.0)

I’m not sure how the mechanics of bed-drowning work, even with a water bed, but that’s what’s fascinating about this list. Half of the causes I wouldn’t have conceived of on my most paranoid day. Like Y35.312: hitting a bystander with a baton.

The point is, you can eat your Brazil nuts, meditate like a champ, and run five miles a day, but it won’t help you if you trip on the sidewalk and crack your skull.

Accidents are the fifth leading cause of death in America (following heart disease, cancer, stroke, and lower respiratory diseases). Home accidents alone account for 21 million medical visits a year.

Safety’s not the sexiest part of the wellness industry, so accident prevention doesn’t get a lot of play in the media. I’m guessing Men’s Health wouldn’t sell a lot of copies with cover lines like WALK THIS WAY: 10 HOT NEW WAYS TO AVOID SLIPPING AND FALLING. But if you want to live a long life—a crucial part of the definition of health—you have to keep safety in mind.

The losing-my-sons incident was the catalyst for a month of safety. I’ve become obsessed with safety. Which is saying something, since I was pretty overprotective before.

When my first son was born, I bought the electric-outlet covers and the foam corners for the tables. As Julie will attest, I got a little carried away. I spent some time on the Internet researching whether you could buy helmets for babies. I didn’t buy the helmets, but I looked. They’ve got such soft heads, you know? Julie mocked me hard for that one. She also mocked me for not wanting to read them The Cat in the Hat. But I stand by that one: Here’s a boy and a girl, left alone, and what do they do? They let a smooth-talking stranger into the house. Then they try to keep the whole incident secret from their parents.

Point is, I thought I was on top of things, safetywise. It turns out I’m an accident-prevention slacker. My harmless-seeming apartment is a death trap. At least according to those who obsess about this stuff even more than I did.

I invited over Meri-K Appy, head of the nonprofit organizations Home Safety Council and Safe Kids USA. Just as my aunt Marti inspected my home for toxins, Appy would scrutinize our apartment for safety violations.

When I answer the door, Appy is scanning the ceiling in the hallway.

“I was just checking to see if you have sprinklers in this building.”

We don’t. Strike one.

As you’d hope with a safety expert, Appy is well put together, her brown hair in a neat bob, her wardrobe a crisp blue blazer and black shirt. I was worried she’d be Nurse Ratched–severe, but she’s warm and funny, prefacing some of her more hard-core suggestions with the phrase “okay, nerd alert here.”

She’s taken aback by how blasé we are as a society about safety. So many of us view fire alarms as a slightly less annoying version of Muzak, background noise we can freely ignore. Appy was recently having dinner at a Chinese restaurant when a fire alarm started honking, and everyone but her family kept happily eating their wonton soups. She couldn’t resist scolding one of the alarm-flouting families on the way out.

“My feeling is that there are so many horrible, terrible ways to die that you can’t do anything about. So why wouldn’t you do something about the ones you can prevent?”

We start in the kitchen. This room is packed with violations. The knives are too accessible. The oven mitts are too close to the stove.

We have a smoke alarm, which is a good start. But in the kitchen? Sometimes people disable kitchen smoke alarms because they go off during cooking.

I swear I haven’t. But I’m not off the hook: The smoke alarm is too old (ten years is the maximum). I need to change the batteries every year. And to be safe, I should sync this smoke alarm with the others in the house.

“Also, you should take a light vacuum and get the dust out of the smoke alarm once a month,” she says. Too much dust desensitizes them.

Oh, and look into getting those sprinklers.

“I’m feeling overwhelmed,” I say.

“I know it’s a lot. But I’m giving you everything, and then you can do the most important.”

Even Appy—the queen of safety herself—can’t do it all. She admits she cooks on her stove’s front burners, even though back ones are ideal from a safety perspective.

Among our many other violations: A pail left in the hallway is a tripping hazard.

Our tub has no slip-resistant decals or grab bars.

Appliances are still plugged in even when not in use.

There’s a glass bowl up on a top shelf.

One saving grace: Our hot water isn’t that hot, far below the 110-degree danger mark. Appy says accidental scaldings are the most underestimated home hazard, responsible for more than one hundred thousand injuries a year.

She notes the candles on our dining room table. I might want to consider flameless, electric candles.

“I use them myself,” she says. “There’s even one with a very subtle vanilla scent.”

I check to make sure Julie’s not listening, since I know this would be an eye roller.

“Sometimes I worry about Hanukkah candles,” I say. “Especially if we have to leave the room and they’re still burning.”

She nods, understandingly. She tells me she has a colleague who worked with Orthodox Jews. And he recommended putting ritual candles in the sink if they are left to burn overnight.

“And what about birthday candles?” I ask.

“I’m torn,” she admits. “Because I love birthdays. But children close to an open flame? What are we teaching our kids with that? You might want to have the kids blow from far away. Some of my friends in fire safety don’t have candles on the cake. They have other things, like flowers.”

Julie returns and I can start speaking in a normal voice again.

“So how’d we do?” I ask.

“You didn’t do too badly,” she says. “I definitely give you a B or B-minus. Luckily, your kids are a little older. Otherwise, you’d get a C-minus.”

The Helmet Experiment

After Appy leaves, I decide my final miniproject will be the Week of Maximum Safety.

I want to get us up to an A-plus apartment. The next morning, I spend an hour on the Internet browsing new smoke alarms and flameless candles. (I decide against the one with fake molten wax dripping down the side. It’s trying too hard.) I take all the glass bowls down from the shelves. I get foot-shaped slip-resistant decals.

I also decide that to be truly, totally safe, I should investigate the idea for which Julie once ridiculed me: the helmet. Not just a helmet for biking or riding go-karts, but a helmet for walking around the city.

Strange as it sounds, I’m not the only one who has considered walking helmets. Over in Denmark in 2009, they launched a campaign that promotes helmets for pedestrians.

The Danish Road Safety Council printed posters featuring stick figures in various situations—shopping, taking the escalator, throwing out trash—all adorned with multicolored helmets. The slogan reads: “A walking helmet is a good helmet. Traffic safety isn’t just for cyclists. The pedestrians of Denmark actually have a higher risk of head injury.”

This was not a prank or an Onion story. I checked.

And what about car helmets? I’m not talking about helmets for NASCAR drivers, but helmets for your average taxi rider or suburban commuter in a Honda. Again, there have been sporadic attempts to get those in the mainstream, to little effect.

So as an experiment, I’ve been wearing my blue bike helmet as I run my errands. It’s not so bad. I’m not getting as many quizzical stares as I predicted; passersby no doubt assume my bike or moped is locked up nearby. And there is a feeling of security. Especially when I run under New York’s omnipresent scaffolding, which I’ve always feared.

I tried it out in the apartment as well. Tonight, I wore it while bringing the boys their plates of pasta. Julie refused to comment, but Lucas admired it so much he ran and put on his bike helmet. His has a pirate on it and thus upstaged my plain-Jane helmet.

After a couple of days, I retire my walking helmet. Partly because I can’t fit both my noise-canceling earphones and my helmet on my head. I had to choose.

Now, helmets for walking and driving are about as likely to take hold as capri pants for men (a very brief fashion trend I once wrote about at Esquire). It’s just never going to happen, even in Denmark. Libertarians would go bonkers. Walking helmets are just too dorky, even for me.

But step back for a minute. Pretend you’re from Mars. From a coldly rational point of view, pedestrian helmets aren’t a crazy idea. As Freakonomics points out, on a per-mile basis, more people die from drunk walking than drunk driving. Pedestrian accidents in general injure sixty thousand people a year and kill more than four thousand.

The reason I even brought up helmets is to illustrate an important point: The way we think about danger is illogical. We cannot do risk assessment to save our life. As Richard Thaler—a professor at the University of Chicago and one of the founders of the field of behavioral economics—told me, “People are terrible at knowing what is really dangerous and what isn’t.” We focus on the wrong dangers, the ones that get the splashy headlines, not the ones that are common or abstract.

Lisa Belkin wrote a provocative article about this topic in The New York Times. As she points out, the five things that cause the most injuries to children eighteen and under are car accidents, homicide (usually by someone they know), child abuse, suicide, and drowning. And the top-five things that parents are most concerned about, according to Mayo Clinic research: kidnapping, school snipers, terrorists, dangerous strangers, and drugs.

Belkin points out that we drive to the store to get “organic veggies (there is no actual data proving that organic foods increase longevity) . . . then check our email at the next red light (2,600 traffic deaths a year are caused by drivers using cell phones, according to a Harvard study).”

Even ten years after 9/11, I’m still jittery about taking the subway. I’m afraid some lunatic is going to blow up the C line. Often I’ll either walk or take a cab instead. Which makes no logical sense. The chance of getting hurt in a taxi accident is much higher than that of a subway bombing.

So what’s a semirational person to do? I’ve drawn up some rules of thumb. Worry about cars, not planes. Worry about fire, not abductions. Exercise, but not so much that it interferes with spending time with your family.

And maybe, just maybe, buy a helmet.