🔗 Share this article

He has always been a man of a bigger-than-life figure. Witty, unsentimental – and hardly ever declining to a further glass. Whenever our families celebrated, he would be the one discussing the most recent controversy to befall a member of parliament, or regaling us with tales of the shameless infidelity of various Sheffield Wednesday players for forty years.

Frequently, we would share Christmas morning with him and his family, then departing for our own celebrations. Yet, on a particular Christmas, some ten years back, when he was scheduled to meet family abroad, he fell down the stairs, with a glass of whisky in hand, a suitcase gripped in the other, and sustained broken ribs. The hospital had patched him up and told him not to fly. Thus, he found himself back with us, doing his best to manage, but looking increasingly peaky.

The Day Progressed

Time passed, yet the stories were not coming in their typical fashion. He insisted he was fine but he didn’t look it. He endeavored to climb the stairs for a nap but was unable to; he tried, gingerly, to eat Christmas lunch, and failed.

So, before I’d so much as placed a party hat on my head, my mother and I made the choice to take him to A&E.

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

A Worrying Turn

When we finally reached the hospital, he had moved from being poorly to hardly aware. Other outpatients helped us get him to a ward, where the distinctive odor of institutional meals and air filled the air.

What was distinct, however, was the mood. There were heroic attempts at holiday cheer in every direction, even with the pervasive sterile and miserable mood; decorations dangled from IV poles and portions of holiday pudding went cold on bedside tables.

Cheerful nurses, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were moving busily and using that great term of endearment so peculiar to the area: “duck”.

A Quiet Journey Back

When visiting hours were over, we returned home to cold bread sauce and festive TV programming. We saw a lighthearted program on television, likely a mystery drama, and played something even dafter, such as a regionally-themed property trading game.

By then it was quite late, and it had begun to snow, and I remember having a sense of anticlimax – did we lose the holiday?

Recovery and Retrospection

Although our friend eventually recovered, he had in fact suffered a punctured lung and went on to get DVT. And, while that Christmas is not my most cherished memory, it has gone down in family lore as “the Christmas I saved a life”.

If that is completely accurate, or contains some artistic license, I am not in a position to judge, 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”.