Assessing fitness, predicting outcome, and the missing axis

This article discusses how to estimate the risk of postoperative death, an outcome that affects an important minority of patients in the month(s) after scheduled surgery. In addition, it reflects on our inability to characterize the effects of surgery on quality of life. This outcome is of primary concern to the much more numerous survivors but is absent from all graphs of postoperative survival: it is the missing axis. The calculations discussed in the article are available online at https://sites.google.com/site/informrisk/.