I tried, sometimes, to picture them all at once, four hundred living rooms in four hundred towns, four hundred versions of the moment I had lived in that hospital chair, the relief breaking over a mother like a wave and knocking her breathless.

I could not hold them all in my mind; the number was too large.

But I could hold one, and then another, and I made myself do it, made myself remember that each digit in that report was a whole world saved, a child who would grow up and fall in love and have children of his own, an entire unlived life handed back across a hospital corridor.

It would have been easy to let them blur into a statistic, a figure to report to a board.