I Drove a Family Friend to A&E – and his condition shifted from peaky to scarcely conscious on the way.

Our family friend has always been a bigger-than-life character. Clever and unemotional – and hardly ever declining to a further glass. At family parties, he’s the one discussing the most recent controversy to catch up with a member of parliament, or entertaining us with stories of the shameless infidelity of different footballers from Sheffield Wednesday for forty years.

We would often spend the holiday morning with him and his family, then departing for our own celebrations. However, one holiday season, about 10 years ago, when he was scheduled to meet family abroad, he took a fall on the steps, holding a drink in one hand, a suitcase gripped in the other, and broke his ribs. Medical staff had treated him and instructed him to avoid flying. So, here he was back with us, making the best of it, but looking increasingly peaky.

As Time Passed

The morning rolled on but the anecdotes weren’t flowing as they usually were. He insisted he was fine but he didn’t look it. He tried to make it upstairs for a nap but found he could not; he tried, gingerly, to eat Christmas lunch, and was unsuccessful.

Thus, prior to me managing to placed a party hat on my head, my mum and I decided 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 peaky to barely responsive. People in the waiting room aided us get him to a ward, where the generic smell of clinical cuisine and atmosphere permeated the space.

What was distinct, however, was the mood. There were heroic attempts at festive gaiety all around, notwithstanding the fundamental depressing and institutional feel; decorations dangled from IV poles and dishes of festive dessert sat uneaten on nightstands.

Cheerful nurses, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were moving busily and using that charming colloquial address so particular to the area: “duck”.

A Quiet Journey Back

Once the permitted time ended, we headed home to chilled holiday sides and Christmas telly. We watched something daft on television, likely a mystery drama, and played something even dafter, such as Sheffield’s take on Monopoly.

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

Healing and Reflection

Although our friend eventually recovered, he had actually punctured a lung and went on to get DVT. And, while that Christmas isn’t a personal favourite, it has entered into our family history as “the Christmas I saved a life”.

How factual that statement is, or a little bit of dramatic licence, I couldn’t possibly comment, but its annual retelling has done no damage to my pride. In keeping with our friend’s motto: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.