I Drove a Close Friend of the Family to the Emergency Room – and his condition shifted from peaky to barely responsive on the way.
Our family friend has always been a larger than life character. Clever and unemotional – and never one to refuse to another brandy. During family gatherings, he is the person gossiping about the newest uproar to involve a member of parliament, or amusing us with accounts of the shameless infidelity of different footballers from Sheffield Wednesday over the past 40 years.
It was common for us to pass the morning of Christmas Day with him and his family, then departing for our own celebrations. However, one holiday season, some ten years back, when he was planning to join family abroad, he took a fall on the steps, whisky in one hand, suitcase in the other, and fractured his 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 like they normally did. He maintained that he felt alright but his condition seemed to contradict this. He endeavored to climb the stairs for a nap but was unable to; he tried, gingerly, to eat Christmas lunch, and failed.
Therefore, before I could even placed a party hat on my head, my mum and I decided to take him to A&E.
The idea of calling for an ambulance crossed our minds, but how long would that take on Christmas Day?
A Worrying Turn
By the time we got there, he’d gone from peaky to barely responsive. Other outpatients helped us guide him to a ward, where the distinctive odor of hospital food and wind permeated the space.
Different though, was the spirit. There were heroic attempts at festive gaiety everywhere you looked, notwithstanding the fundamental depressing and institutional feel; tinsel hung from drip stands and bowls of Christmas pudding congealed on nightstands.
Positive medical attendants, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were working diligently and using that great term of endearment so unique to the area: “duck”.
A Quiet Journey Back
Once the permitted time ended, we returned home to chilled holiday sides and holiday television. We viewed something silly on television, probably Agatha Christie, and played something even dafter, such as a local version of the board game.
It was already late, and it had begun to snow, and I remember feeling deflated – did we lose the holiday?
Healing and Reflection
Even though he ultimately healed, he had in fact suffered a punctured lung and later developed a serious circulatory condition. And, although that holiday does not rank among my favorites, 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, is not for me to definitively say, but the story’s yearly repetition certainly hasn’t hurt my ego. And, as our friend always says: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.
