I Took a Close Friend of the Family to A&E – and his condition shifted from peaky to barely responsive on the way.
He has always been a man of a truly outsized character. Clever and unemotional – and hardly ever declining to another brandy. At family parties, he is the person chatting about the latest scandal to involve a local MP, or amusing us with accounts of the notorious womanizing of different footballers from Sheffield Wednesday over the past 40 years.
Frequently, we would share the holiday morning with him and his family, then departing for our own celebrations. However, one holiday season, roughly a decade past, when he was planning to join family abroad, he took a fall on the steps, whisky in one hand, his luggage in the other, and sustained broken ribs. The hospital had patched him up and instructed him to avoid flying. Thus, he found himself back with us, doing his best to manage, but looking increasingly peaky.
The Morning Rolled On
The morning rolled on but the anecdotes weren’t flowing like they normally did. 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, cautiously, to eat Christmas lunch, and did not manage.
Thus, prior to me managing to placed a party hat on my head, we resolved to take him to A&E.
We considered summoning an ambulance, but how much of a delay would there be on Christmas Day?
A Deteriorating Condition
When we finally reached the hospital, he had moved from being unwell to almost unconscious. Fellow patients assisted us help him reach a treatment area, where the distinctive odor of hospital food and wind filled the air.
The atmosphere, however, was unique. One could see valiant efforts at festive gaiety all around, even with the pervasive sterile and miserable mood; festive strands were attached to medical equipment and bowls of Christmas pudding congealed on bedside tables.
Cheerful nurses, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were working diligently and using that charming colloquial address so peculiar to the area: “duck”.
Heading Home for Leftovers
After our time at the hospital concluded, we made our way home to lukewarm condiments and festive TV programming. We watched something daft on television, perhaps a detective story, and played something even dafter, such as a local version of the board game.
By then it was quite late, and snow was falling, and I remember having a sense of anticlimax – had we missed Christmas?
The Aftermath and the Story
Even though he ultimately healed, he had truly experienced a lung puncture and later developed deep vein thrombosis. And, while that Christmas is not my most cherished memory, it has gone down in family lore as “the Christmas I saved a life”.
Whether that’s strictly true, or contains some artistic license, I couldn’t possibly comment, but hearing it told each year certainly hasn’t hurt my ego. In keeping with our friend’s motto: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.
