🔗 Share this article I Drove a Family Friend to the Emergency Room – and he went from peaky to scarcely conscious on the way. He has always been a man of a bigger-than-life personality. Witty, unsentimental – and not one to say no to an extra drink. Whenever our families celebrated, he would be the one chatting about the most recent controversy to involve a local MP, or regaling us with tales of the outrageous philandering of different footballers from Sheffield Wednesday for forty years. Frequently, we would share the holiday morning with him and his family, then departing for our own celebrations. But, one Christmas, roughly a decade past, when he was planning to join family abroad, he tumbled down the staircase, whisky in one hand, suitcase in the other, and sustained broken ribs. He was treated at the hospital and advised against air travel. Consequently, he ended up back with us, making the best of it, but looking increasingly peaky. As Time Passed Time passed, yet the humorous tales were absent like they normally did. He maintained that he felt alright but he didn’t look it. He attempted to go upstairs for a nap but found he could not; he tried, gingerly, to eat Christmas lunch, and did not manage. Thus, prior to me managing to placed a party hat on my head, we resolved to drive him to the emergency room. We considered summoning an ambulance, 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. Fellow patients assisted us guide him to a ward, where the generic smell of institutional meals and air filled the air. The atmosphere, however, was unique. People were making brave attempts at festive gaiety everywhere you looked, despite the underlying clinical and somber atmosphere; tinsel hung from drip stands 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 After our time at the hospital concluded, we headed home to lukewarm condiments 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. By then it was quite late, and it had begun to snow, and I remember having a sense of anticlimax – had we missed Christmas? The Aftermath and the Story While our friend did get better in time, he had truly experienced a lung puncture and later developed DVT. And, even if that particular Christmas isn’t a personal favourite, it has entered into our family history as “the Christmas I saved a life”. Whether that’s strictly true, or involves a degree of exaggeration, I am not in a position to judge, but hearing it told each year has definitely been good for my self-esteem. In keeping with our friend’s motto: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.