Defying the Odds

The likelihood of one person being bitten by a bear, shark, and a venomous snake are 1 in 893.35 quadrillion.  In case you are wondering, this is what the odds look like:

1 / 893,350,000,000,000,000

In more technical terms, those are what you would call “minuscule” odds.

Strangely enough (I really, really, really fought the urge not write oddly enough), one man actually defied these odds. 

Dylan McWilliams started this grim trifecta in 2015 when a rattlesnake stuck him while he was on a hiking excursion in Utah.

The odds of getting bitten by a venous snake in the United States are 1 in 37,500.

Dylan registered his next attack while camping in the mountains of Colorado in 2017.  Not a shark attack, mind you.  Nope.  In this attack, Dylan woke from sleep only to find his head was clamped firmly in the mouth an enormous black bear.  He managed get the bear to release by repeatedly poking the bear in the eye.  Nine staples were required to close the lacerations.

Odds for getting injured by a bear are 1 in 2.1 million.

In 2018, while body surfing the blue waters off Kauai, Hawaii, a shark chomped on Dylan’s leg.   He managed to break free of the shark—believed to have been a tiger shark—by kicking it with his other leg.

Until that shark attack, his odds for such occurring in U.S. waters were only 1 in 11.5 million.

You might think Dylan McWilliams’ unlucky relationship with the odds of attack would dissuade him from all outdoor activity.  Hardly so.  Dylan, just now entering his twenties, participated in a survival challenge on Naked and Afraid, the Discovery Channel reality program.

I don’t mean to be a spoiler here, but he made only 6 out of the 21 days.  No, he was not taken down by a lion.

This time it appears to have been bacteria.

Odds are pretty good on that.

—Mitchell Hegman

Sources: National Geographic, Discovery, BBC