I Drove a Family Friend to A&E – and he went from peaky to barely responsive during the journey.
He has always been a man of a bigger-than-life personality. Clever and unemotional – and hardly ever declining to an extra drink. At family parties, he’s the one gossiping about the newest uproar to catch up with a member of parliament, or regaling us with tales of the notorious womanizing of different footballers from Sheffield Wednesday over the past 40 years.
It was common for us to pass Christmas morning with him and his family, before going our separate ways. However, one holiday season, roughly a decade past, when he was planning to join family abroad, he tumbled down the staircase, with a glass of whisky in hand, his luggage in the other, and broke his ribs. He was treated at the hospital and told him not to fly. Consequently, he ended up back with us, making the best of it, but looking increasingly peaky.
The Day Progressed
Time passed, yet the humorous tales were absent in their typical fashion. He maintained that he felt alright but his appearance suggested otherwise. He tried to make it upstairs for a nap but found he could not; he tried, gingerly, to eat Christmas lunch, and did not manage.
So, before I’d so much as don any celebratory headwear, my mum and I decided to drive him to the emergency room.
We considered summoning an ambulance, but how long would that take on Christmas Day?
A Rapid Decline
By the time we got there, he’d gone from poorly to hardly aware. Fellow patients assisted us get him to a ward, where the characteristic scent of hospital food and wind filled the air.
What was distinct, however, was the mood. There were heroic attempts at holiday cheer everywhere you looked, despite the underlying depressing and institutional feel; festive strands were attached to medical equipment and dishes of festive dessert sat uneaten on nightstands.
Upbeat nursing staff, 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 Quiet Journey Back
Once the permitted time ended, we returned home to lukewarm condiments and festive TV programming. We watched something daft 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 feeling deflated – had we missed Christmas?
Healing and Reflection
While our friend did get better in time, he had truly experienced a lung puncture and subsequently contracted DVT. And, even if that particular Christmas 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 involves a degree of exaggeration, is not for me to definitively say, 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”.
