A lot of Saudi hospitals I wrote about had websites that hadn’t been touched in years.
No numbers anywhere. No dates on the programme pages. About pages and newsrooms giving me two conflicting founding years for the same institution.
Most writers, when handed that, reach for the same fix. Find the numbers elsewhere. A directory, a news story from 4 years ago. Build the paragraph on those and it will look complete, and anybody who checks will find exactly what I found.
So I went looking for characteristics instead. Things that were only true of this one place. Facts nobody updates, because nobody files them as facts.
There is a medical city in Riyadh with 4 hospitals. A children’s hospital, a women’s hospital, a main hospital. The fourth was built for recovery alone.
You know something about that place now, and I have not told you how many beds it has.
A surgeon in Riyadh performs a heart transplant in ’86. 10 years later he publishes a report on 25 of them. The youngest patient was 22 months old. The hospital that carries his name came much later. There is one name on the paper.
I could have written that it was founded by a pioneer of cardiac surgery in the Kingdom, and the sentence would have passed.
One name on the paper does the same work better, and it asks nothing of you.
The numbers were never the information. They were what I reached for when I had still not found anything.
Nobody asked me where the numbers had gone.