I Took a Family Friend to the Emergency Room – and his condition shifted from peaky to barely responsive on the way.
This individual has long been known as a bigger-than-life personality. Clever and unemotional – and hardly ever declining to a further glass. Whenever our families celebrated, he would be the one discussing 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 morning of Christmas Day with him and his family, before going our separate ways. Yet, on a particular Christmas, some ten years back, when he was supposed to be meeting family abroad, he took a fall on the steps, whisky in one hand, suitcase in the other, and sustained broken ribs. The hospital had patched him up and told him not to fly. Consequently, he ended up back with us, making the best of it, but seeming progressively worse.
As Time Passed
The morning rolled on but the anecdotes weren’t flowing in their typical fashion. He maintained that he felt alright but his appearance suggested otherwise. He attempted to go upstairs for a nap but couldn’t; he tried, carefully, to eat Christmas lunch, and failed.
So, before I’d so much as put on a festive hat, my mother and I made the choice to take him to A&E.
The idea of calling for an ambulance crossed our minds, but how much of a delay would there be on Christmas Day?
A Worrying Turn
By the time we got there, he had moved from being poorly to hardly aware. Other outpatients helped us help him reach a treatment area, where the characteristic scent of hospital food and wind filled the air.
Different though, was the spirit. There were heroic attempts at holiday cheer all around, notwithstanding the fundamental sterile and miserable mood; festive strands were attached to medical equipment and bowls of Christmas pudding congealed on bedside tables.
Cheerful nurses, who certainly would have chosen to be at home, were moving busily and using that great term of endearment so unique to the area: “duck”.
Heading Home for Leftovers
When visiting hours were over, we returned home to lukewarm condiments and holiday television. We watched something daft on television, probably Agatha Christie, and engaged in an even sillier game, such as a local version of the board 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
Although our friend eventually recovered, he had truly experienced a lung puncture and went on to get a serious circulatory condition. And, while that Christmas does not rank among my favorites, it has entered into our family history as “the Christmas I saved a life”.
If that is completely accurate, or involves a degree of exaggeration, is not for me to definitively say, but the story’s yearly repetition has done no damage to my pride. True to his favorite phrase: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.
