I Took a Close Friend of the Family to A&E – and he went from unwell to scarcely conscious on the way.
He has always been a man of a bigger-than-life character. Clever and unemotional – and hardly ever declining to a further glass. During family gatherings, he is the person chatting about the most recent controversy to befall a member of parliament, or amusing us with accounts of the notorious womanizing of various Sheffield Wednesday players for forty years.
We would often spend Christmas morning with him and his family, before going our separate ways. But, one Christmas, roughly a decade past, when he was supposed to be meeting family abroad, he fell down the stairs, whisky in one hand, his luggage in the other, and sustained broken ribs. He was treated at the hospital and advised against air travel. Consequently, he ended up 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 in their typical fashion. He insisted he was fine but his condition seemed to contradict this. He attempted to go upstairs for a nap but was unable to; he tried, cautiously, to eat Christmas lunch, and was unsuccessful.
Therefore, before I could even put on a festive hat, we resolved to drive him to the emergency room.
We thought about calling an ambulance, but what would the wait time be on Christmas Day?
A Rapid Decline
Upon our arrival, his state had progressed from peaky to barely responsive. Fellow patients assisted us guide him to a ward, where the generic smell of institutional meals and air filled the air.
What was distinct, however, was the mood. One could see valiant efforts at festive gaiety everywhere you looked, even with the pervasive depressing and institutional feel; decorations dangled from IV poles and dishes of festive dessert sat uneaten on nightstands.
Positive medical attendants, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were working diligently and using that lovely local expression so particular to the area: “duck”.
Heading Home for Leftovers
When visiting hours were over, we returned home to lukewarm condiments and festive TV programming. We viewed something silly on television, probably Agatha Christie, and engaged in an even sillier game, such as a regionally-themed property trading game.
By then it was quite late, and snowing, and I remember having a sense of anticlimax – did we lose the holiday?
Recovery and Retrospection
While our friend did get better in time, he had in fact suffered a punctured lung and went on to get deep vein thrombosis. And, even if that particular 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 a little bit of dramatic licence, I am not in a position to judge, but its annual retelling 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”.