Say out loud, to the nurse, at admission: if anything happens, I want my sister called as well as my husband.

It is not binding.

It changes everything, because it means that at four in the afternoon on a bad Wednesday there is a second person in a corridor who has a stake in you and no stake in the story.

And four, which I say last and which is the one I actually came to say.

If you are ever the well person in a crisis — and most of you in this room will be, at some point, for somebody — your job is not to protect the unwell person from information.

You will feel, with absolute certainty, that it is.