The Numbers That Are Not About Him

You looked it up on the Tuesday, about four hours after he told you, and you have not been able to put it down since.

You know the figure. You know the figure for his stage and you know the figure for the stage below, which is better, and the one above, which is not. You know that the numbers are five years old because that is how these things are collected, and you know that treatment has moved on since, and neither of those facts has been the slightest use to you at one in the morning.

You did not go looking for a percentage. You went looking to understand, which is what a friend does, and the percentage was in the third paragraph and now it is in you.

And you cannot say it to anybody.

Not to him, obviously. Not to his wife. Not to the others, because they have not looked and you would be handing them a thing they did not ask for.

So it sits with you, and you carry it into every conversation you have with him now. He rings about football and you are talking to a percentage.

That is the actual damage of the last three weeks, and it is not to him. It is that a number has got between you and your friend.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you the statistics are wrong. They are not wrong; they are just not about him, and those are different things and I am not going to blur them to make you feel better.

I am not going to tell you not to be informed. Understanding roughly what he is facing helps you be useful: it means you know why he is tired on the Thursday and not the Monday, and that is worth something.

And I am not going to tell you what happens to him. Nobody knows and nobody should pretend to.

What I am going to do is take the number off you, because it is doing nothing for him and a great deal to you.

You are not disloyal for having looked. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it makes no exception for a heart breaking about a friend, and the Holy Spirit is on that path at one in the morning with somebody carrying a figure nobody knows they are carrying.

The verse tells a soul to come back

There is a line in Psalm 116 that is somebody speaking to themselves.

Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.Psalm 116:7

Notice who is being addressed. Not God. His own soul.

That is a man who has been somewhere, and who is calling himself back from it. The psalm around it is about being brought very low, about death having got hold of him, about crying out. He is not writing from a comfortable place.

And return is the word. It assumes his soul had a rest and left it, and that going back is possible.

That is exactly your position. You had somewhere to stand with your friend three weeks ago. It was not naive; you knew he was ill. But you were with him rather than with a number. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 116:7, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

You have gone somewhere since, without meaning to, in four hours on a Tuesday. And this verse says the road back exists and that a person can walk it deliberately.

You are not stuck where the Tuesday put you. Scripture says return unto thy rest, O my soul, Psalm 116:7, and the returning is described as something a person tells themselves to do rather than something that happens to them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that possible in somebody who has been carrying a figure for three weeks.

What a percentage actually is

Here is the thing worth understanding properly, because it will loosen the number's grip.

A survival statistic is a description of a group. It says that out of a large number of people with something broadly similar, recorded some years ago, treated with what was available then, a certain proportion were alive at a certain point.

It is not a probability about your friend. It cannot be, because it contains none of the things that are true about him specifically: his age, his other health, how it was caught, how he responds, what is available now that was not then, and about fifteen things his consultant knows and you do not.

Applying a group figure to one person is the single most common mistake people make with these numbers, and clinicians spend a great deal of time gently undoing it.

That does not mean he is fine. It means the number you are carrying is not a forecast about him, and you have been treating it as one for three weeks.

You are not holding information about your friend. Scripture says the secret things belong unto the Lord our God, Deuteronomy 29:29, and what is ahead for one man is exactly such a thing, and the Holy Spirit is not letting you see something in a table that He has withheld from everybody else.

What he needs from you

This is the practical part, and it is the reason the number has to go.

He does not need you informed. He has a consultant for that.

He needs somebody to be normal with. That is genuinely rare in his life at the moment: almost everybody who rings him now rings about the illness, with a careful voice, and asks how he is in a particular tone, and he can hear it every time.

You were the one who rang about football. This rests on Scripture in Psalm 116:7, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

If you go on carrying that percentage, you will not be able to do it. It will be in your voice. He will hear it, because people who are ill become extremely good at hearing it, and he will start managing you, which is the last thing he needs to be spending energy on.

So putting the number down is not denial. It is the specific thing that keeps you useful to him.

You are not going to help him by knowing his odds. Scripture says a friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity, Proverbs 17:17, and what is described is presence across time rather than information, and the Holy Spirit is at work in an ordinary conversation about nothing much.