I Drove a Close Friend of the Family to the Emergency Room – and he went from unwell to scarcely conscious during the journey.
He has always been a man of a bigger-than-life personality. Witty, unsentimental – and never one to refuse to a further glass. Whenever our families celebrated, he’s the one gossiping about the newest uproar to involve a member of parliament, or regaling us with tales of the outrageous philandering of various Sheffield Wednesday players for forty years.
It was common for us to pass the holiday morning with him and his family, prior to heading off to our own plans. However, one holiday season, about 10 years ago, when he was planning to join family abroad, he fell down the stairs, with a glass of whisky in hand, his luggage in the other, and fractured his ribs. He was treated at the hospital and told him not to fly. Thus, he found himself back with us, doing his best to manage, but looking increasingly peaky.
As Time Passed
The hours went by, however, the anecdotes weren’t flowing like they normally did. He insisted he was fine but his appearance suggested otherwise. He endeavored to climb the stairs for a nap but couldn’t; he tried, carefully, to eat Christmas lunch, and did not manage.
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.
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’d gone from peaky to barely responsive. Fellow patients assisted us get him to a ward, where the distinctive odor of hospital food and wind permeated the space.
The atmosphere, however, was unique. People were making brave attempts at Christmas spirit everywhere you looked, despite the underlying sterile and miserable mood; decorations dangled from IV poles and portions of holiday pudding went cold on nightstands.
Positive medical attendants, who undoubtedly would have preferred to be at home, were moving busily and using that charming colloquial address so peculiar to the area: “duck”.
A Subdued Return Home
Once the permitted time ended, we headed home to cold bread sauce and festive TV programming. We viewed something silly on television, probably Agatha Christie, and played something even dafter, 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 – had we missed Christmas?
The Aftermath and the Story
Although our friend eventually recovered, he had in fact suffered a punctured lung and went on to get DVT. And, even if that particular Christmas does not rank among my favorites, it has gone down in family lore as “the Christmas I saved a life”.
How factual that statement is, or involves a degree of exaggeration, is not for me to definitively say, but the story’s yearly repetition certainly hasn’t hurt my ego. True to his favorite phrase: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.
