🔗 Share this article I Took a Family Friend to A&E – and he went from peaky to barely responsive during the journey. He has always been a man of a truly outsized figure. Clever and unemotional – and hardly ever declining to an extra drink. During family gatherings, he’s the one chatting about the latest scandal to involve a local MP, or regaling us with tales of the outrageous philandering of different footballers from Sheffield Wednesday for forty years. It was common for us to pass the holiday morning with him and his family, before going our separate ways. Yet, on a particular Christmas, about 10 years ago, when he was planning to join family abroad, he fell down the stairs, holding a drink in one hand, his luggage in the other, and fractured his ribs. Medical staff had treated him and advised against air travel. Consequently, he ended up back with us, trying to cope, but looking increasingly peaky. The Morning Rolled On Time passed, yet the anecdotes weren’t flowing in their typical fashion. He insisted he was fine but his condition seemed to contradict this. He endeavored to climb the stairs for a nap but couldn’t; he tried, carefully, to eat Christmas lunch, and failed. Therefore, before I could even placed a party hat on my head, my mother and I made the choice to drive him to the emergency room. We considered summoning an ambulance, but what would the wait time be on Christmas Day? A Deteriorating Condition When we finally reached the hospital, his state had progressed from poorly to hardly aware. Fellow patients assisted us help him reach a treatment area, where the distinctive odor of hospital food and wind was noticeable. The atmosphere, however, was unique. There were heroic attempts at Christmas spirit everywhere you looked, despite the underlying depressing and institutional feel; decorations dangled from IV poles and bowls of Christmas pudding congealed on nightstands. Cheerful nurses, who undoubtedly would have preferred to be at home, were working diligently and using that lovely local expression so unique to the area: “duck”. A Quiet Journey Back Once the permitted time ended, we made our way home to lukewarm condiments and Christmas telly. We saw a lighthearted program on television, probably Agatha Christie, and took part in a more foolish pastime, such as a regionally-themed property trading game. It was already late, and snow was falling, and I remember having a sense of anticlimax – was Christmas effectively over for us? Recovery and Retrospection While our friend did get better in time, he had truly experienced a lung puncture and later developed a serious circulatory condition. And, even if that particular Christmas isn’t a personal favourite, it has gone down in family lore as “the Christmas I saved a life”. Whether that’s strictly true, or involves a degree of exaggeration, is not for me to definitively say, but the story’s yearly repetition certainly hasn’t hurt my ego. True to his favorite phrase: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.