I Drove a Close Friend of the Family to A&E – and he went from peaky to barely responsive on the way.

He has always been a man of a truly outsized character. Witty, unsentimental – and never one to refuse to another brandy. At family parties, he’s the one chatting about the newest uproar to involve a local MP, or regaling us with tales of the notorious womanizing of various Sheffield Wednesday players for forty years.

It was common for us to pass the morning of Christmas Day with him and his family, then departing for our own celebrations. But, one Christmas, roughly a decade past, when he was scheduled to meet family abroad, he fell down the stairs, whisky in one hand, suitcase in the other, and fractured his ribs. The hospital had patched him up and instructed him to avoid flying. Thus, he found himself back with us, making the best of it, but appearing more and more unwell.

The Day Progressed

The hours went by, however, the stories were not coming as they usually were. He maintained that he felt alright but his condition seemed to contradict this. He attempted to go upstairs for a nap but couldn’t; he tried, gingerly, to eat Christmas lunch, and was unsuccessful.

Therefore, before I could even put on a festive hat, my mother and I made the choice to get him to the hospital.

We thought about calling an ambulance, but how long would that take on Christmas Day?

A Rapid Decline

Upon our arrival, he had moved from being poorly to hardly aware. Fellow patients assisted us guide him to a ward, where the generic smell of institutional meals and air permeated the space.

What was distinct, however, was the mood. There were heroic attempts at festive gaiety everywhere you looked, notwithstanding the fundamental sterile and miserable mood; decorations dangled from IV poles and dishes of festive dessert sat uneaten on tables next to the beds.

Cheerful nurses, who certainly would have chosen to be at home, were bustling about and using that great term of endearment so particular to the area: “duck”.

A Quiet Journey Back

When visiting hours were over, we made our way home to lukewarm condiments and holiday television. We watched something daft on television, perhaps a detective story, and played something even dafter, such as a regionally-themed property trading game.

By then it was quite late, and snow was falling, and I remember having a sense of anticlimax – had we missed Christmas?

Recovery and Retrospection

While our friend did get better in time, he had truly experienced a lung puncture and later developed deep vein thrombosis. And, while that Christmas does not rank among my favorites, it has entered into our family history as “the Christmas I saved a life”.

Whether that’s strictly true, or a little bit of dramatic licence, is not for me to definitively say, but its annual retelling has done no damage to my pride. In keeping with our friend’s motto: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.