🔗 Share this article

Our family friend has always been a bigger-than-life personality. Sharp and not prone to sentiment – and not one to say no to a further glass. Whenever our families celebrated, he is the person discussing the latest scandal to involve a regional politician, or entertaining us with stories of the shameless infidelity of various Sheffield Wednesday players for forty years.

We would often spend Christmas morning with him and his family, prior to heading off to our own plans. 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, a suitcase gripped in the other, and sustained broken ribs. Medical staff had treated him and told him not to fly. Thus, he found himself back with us, doing his best to manage, but appearing more and more unwell.

As Time Passed

Time passed, yet the stories were not coming as they usually were. He was convinced he was OK but his condition seemed to contradict this. He endeavored to climb the stairs for a nap but found he could not; he tried, carefully, to eat Christmas lunch, and did not manage.

Thus, prior to me managing to placed a party hat on my head, my mum and I decided to get him to the hospital.

The idea of calling for an ambulance crossed our minds, but how long would that take on Christmas Day?

A Deteriorating Condition

By the time we got there, he’d gone from peaky to barely responsive. Fellow patients assisted us help him reach a treatment area, where the characteristic scent of institutional meals and air permeated the space.

Different though, was the spirit. There were heroic attempts at holiday cheer all around, notwithstanding the fundamental depressing and institutional feel; tinsel hung from drip stands and dishes of festive dessert sat uneaten on nightstands.

Cheerful nurses, who certainly would have chosen to be at home, were working diligently and using that charming colloquial address so peculiar to the area: “duck”.

A Subdued Return Home

After our time at the hospital concluded, we made our way home to lukewarm condiments and Christmas telly. We viewed something silly on television, likely a mystery drama, and engaged in an even sillier game, such as Sheffield’s take on Monopoly.

The hour was already advanced, and snow was falling, and I remember feeling deflated – did we lose the holiday?

The Aftermath and the Story

While our friend did get better in time, he had in fact suffered a punctured lung and went on to get DVT. And, although that holiday is not my most cherished memory, it has gone down in family lore as “the Christmas I saved a life”.

Whether that’s strictly true, or contains some artistic license, is not for me to definitively say, but hearing it told each year 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”.