I Took a Close Friend of the Family to A&E – and he went from unwell to scarcely conscious during the journey.
He has always been a man of a truly outsized figure. Witty, unsentimental – and not one to say no to an extra drink. During family gatherings, he is the person chatting about the most recent controversy to involve a regional politician, or entertaining us with stories of the outrageous philandering of different footballers from Sheffield Wednesday during the last four decades.
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 tumbled down the staircase, with a glass of whisky in hand, suitcase in the other, and fractured his ribs. Medical staff had treated him and told him not to fly. So, here he was back with us, making the best of it, but seeming progressively worse.
As Time Passed
Time passed, yet the stories were not coming in their typical fashion. He was convinced he was OK but his condition seemed to contradict this. He tried to make it upstairs for a nap but was unable to; he tried, carefully, to eat Christmas lunch, and did not manage.
Thus, prior to me managing to don any celebratory headwear, we resolved to get him to the hospital.
We considered summoning an ambulance, but what would the wait time be on Christmas Day?
A Worrying Turn
By the time we got there, 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.
Different though, was the spirit. There were heroic attempts at Christmas spirit everywhere you looked, even with the pervasive depressing and institutional feel; decorations dangled from IV poles and bowls of Christmas pudding congealed on bedside tables.
Cheerful nurses, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were bustling about and using that great term of endearment so peculiar to the area: “duck”.
A Quiet Journey Back
When visiting hours were over, we made our way home to chilled holiday sides and Christmas telly. We saw a lighthearted program on television, perhaps a detective story, and engaged in an even sillier game, such as Sheffield’s take on Monopoly.
By then it was quite late, and snowing, and I remember feeling deflated – had we missed Christmas?
Recovery and Retrospection
Even though he ultimately healed, he had in fact suffered a punctured lung and went on to get deep vein thrombosis. And, while that Christmas is not my most cherished memory, it has entered into our family history as “the Christmas I saved a life”.
If that is completely accurate, or contains some artistic license, is not for me to definitively say, but its annual retelling certainly hasn’t hurt my ego. True to his favorite phrase: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.
