🔗 Share this article I Drove a Family Friend to the Emergency Room – and he went from peaky to scarcely conscious during the journey. He has always been a man of a larger than life personality. Clever and unemotional – and never one to refuse to an extra drink. At family parties, he is the person chatting about the latest scandal to befall a regional politician, or amusing us with accounts of the notorious womanizing of different footballers from Sheffield Wednesday for forty years. Frequently, we would share the holiday morning with him and his family, before going our separate ways. However, one holiday season, some ten years back, when he was planning to join family abroad, he took a fall on the steps, holding a drink in one hand, a suitcase gripped in the other, and sustained broken ribs. The hospital had patched him up and instructed him to avoid flying. So, here he was back with us, doing his best to manage, but looking increasingly peaky. The Day Progressed The morning rolled on but the stories were not coming in their typical fashion. He insisted he was fine but his appearance suggested otherwise. He endeavored to climb the stairs for a nap but couldn’t; he tried, cautiously, to eat Christmas lunch, and did not manage. Therefore, before I could even placed a party hat on my head, my mother and I made the choice to drive him to the emergency room. The idea of calling for an ambulance crossed our minds, but how much of a delay would there be on Christmas Day? A Deteriorating Condition Upon our arrival, he’d gone from unwell to almost unconscious. Other outpatients helped us help him reach a treatment area, where the characteristic scent of hospital food and wind filled the air. The atmosphere, however, was unique. People were making brave attempts at Christmas spirit everywhere you looked, even with the pervasive clinical and somber atmosphere; festive strands were attached to medical equipment and dishes of festive dessert sat uneaten on nightstands. Upbeat nursing staff, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were working diligently and using that charming colloquial address so peculiar to the area: “duck”. Heading Home for Leftovers After our time at the hospital concluded, we returned home to chilled holiday sides and holiday television. We viewed something silly on television, perhaps a detective story, and played something even dafter, such as a regionally-themed property trading game. The hour was already advanced, and snowing, and I remember experiencing a letdown – was Christmas effectively over for us? The Aftermath and the Story While our friend did get better in time, he had actually punctured a lung and subsequently contracted deep vein thrombosis. And, even if that particular Christmas is not my most cherished memory, it has become part of family legend as “the Christmas I saved a life”. If that is completely accurate, or involves a degree of exaggeration, I couldn’t possibly comment, but its annual retelling 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”.