0.00002%

I'm no good with numbers. In fact I'm stunningly inept when it comes to math. But after our last few days of meetings, going through the ins and outs of heart transplantation, I've got a lot of numbers all jumbling around in my head and I thought this morning that I would try to make sense of a few of them.

It all started with our first meeting with Alli, the transplant nurse, who will be our primary liaison between all the various doctors and departments that are going to get involved in this thing. She says we're going to hear a lot of different things from a lot of different people and until we run it past her we're not to believe any of it. Nice to think there could be a stable core at the centre of all this madness.

The first question she asked us was: How many transplants do you think we do here at SickKids in a year?

We have no idea... 3000? 1000? 400? 100?

The average is 20. And apparently SickKids is a leading centre in the world for this kind of surgery, with the staff here producing much of the research that has helped advance the field in the last 15 years. Worldwide there are only about 450 pediatric (birth to 18yrs) heart transplants done each year. Which I think, after taking a quick stroll through a wikipedia entry of the current world population estimates, is about 0.00002% of all the kids alive right now. I haven't tried, but if I were to start adding into the mix all the strange, unexpected, and rare events that Ford has suffered through in the last 9 months, beginning initially with the rarest of the rare, the diagnosis of HLHS, I imagine I'd just hit a wall of static and start craving steak.

But while I might not be very good at understanding numbers, I remember someone who is! And I tracked down a quote that comes from one of my favourite books, For the Time Being:

Is it important if you have yet died your death, or I? Your father? Your child? It is only a matter of time, after all. Why do we find it so supremely pertinent, during any moment of any century on earth, which among us is topsides? Why do we concern ourselves over which side of the membrane of topsoil our feet poke?

“A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” Joseph Stalin, that connoisseur, gave words to this disquieting and possibly universal sentiment.

How can an individual count? Do we individuals count only to us other suckers, who love and grieve like elephants, bless their hearts? Of Allah, the Koran says, “Not so much as the weight of an ant in earth or heaven escapes from the Lord.” That is touching, that Allah, God, and their ilk care when one ant dismembers another, or note when a sparrow falls, but I strain to see the use of it.

Ten years ago we thought there were two galaxies for each of us alive. Lately, since we loosed the Hubble Space Telescope, we have revised our figures. There are nine galaxies for each of us. Each galaxy harbors an average of 100 billion suns. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are sixty-nine suns for each person alive. The Hubble shows, says a report, that the universe “is at least 15 billion years old.” Two galaxies, nine galaxies… sixty-nine suns, 100 billion suns –

These astronomers are nickel-and-diming us to death.

It's hard sometimes, as we swing wildly between the infinitely large and unimaginable, and the infinitesimally small and imperceptible, to remember that there is a little baby lying in the middle of all this (although i think Christa has an easier time with that than I do). And regardless of what's going on at a molecular level in his blood, or how close we are to having his heart replaced, he still wiggles when we rub his feet and smacks his lips and stares up at us while we sing to him.

So we'll cheer on the accumulation of 'point zeros' as they pile up in front of his statistical insignificance because we know that they correlate exactly to an exponential increase in the desperate measures taken to preserve his preciousness.

So. All that aside, how is Ford doing?

Ford is ok. We have been putting up a big fight this time around to have his day to day management tailored to the way we got used to things back in Vancouver, to the way that we have found he is most comfortable. It peaked two days ago with another angry bout of arguing and shouting, four of us around his bed, while poor Ford writhed and sweated in feverish distress. This time though, after tersely listing her CV for us to step back in awe of, and me rolling my eyes and demanding they stop patronizing us, and Christa crying, and the nurse's hands trembling uncomfortably throughout the argument, the fellow relented and allowed Ford to be rolled on his belly and went to get him the gentle cooling fan that we wanted them to use instead of paralytics and bags of ice, and we have seen no more sudden spikes in his fever or prolonged periods of discomfort.

There is a lot to relate regarding the impending operation, the recovery, Ford's new life, and all the potential complications that could get in the way of things between now and then, but it's still settling into us and is hard to concisely sum up here. It will undoubtedly make it's way out over the next few days, but for the moment everything's still a go. Could be a day, could be a year... more wait and see.