Do they guarantee you will live? No they don't. It is policy that they give percentages, odds if you like. The odds of my sort of thing going wrong are about 2% - the same odds i got a couple of years previously for a cataract operation. . But of course that depends on other things. How old you are - I wasn't very old. How sick you are generally - I was perfectly well in all other ways, or pretty well. The skill of the surgeon - mine was the best, and he was pretty conscious of that. Actually in the end another surgeon did the biz, but Saint Thomas's in London, opposite the Houses of Parliament is the best we have. I might have gone to some hospital nearer to me which was less good, or even rank bad. They call it The Postcode Lottery, but in my case it was another slice of luck, that my heart surgeon in Canterbury had all these London contacts. So the surgeon gave me to believe that there was very little risk. I simplified for the sake of the poem.
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