I spend the majority of my time entrenched in statistics. Using statistics. Studying statistics. Developing and testing statistical software. Statistics guide many of my decisions at work and in life. That’s the world of an engineer.

For this reason, you can imagine my surprise when my husband called me at work on a bright, sunny June day in 2009 to tell me that our 4-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with Lyme disease. That, to me, seemed completely improbable. We live in a development in suburbia. Our children don’t play deep in the woods. We don’t hike in the woods. In accordance with the tick warnings that year, we were vigilant in our nightly tick checks. How could she have contracted Lyme disease? Where did she contract Lyme disease?

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