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Our family friend has always been a larger than life figure. Witty, unsentimental – and not one to say no to another brandy. At family parties, he’s the one chatting about the newest uproar to befall a local MP, or regaling us with tales of the shameless infidelity of various Sheffield Wednesday players over the past 40 years.

Frequently, we would share the holiday morning with him and his family, before going our separate ways. But, one Christmas, about 10 years ago, when he was supposed to be meeting family abroad, he took a fall on the steps, 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. Thus, he found himself back with us, making the best of it, but appearing more and more unwell.

The Morning Rolled On

The hours went by, however, the anecdotes weren’t flowing in their typical fashion. He insisted he was fine but his condition seemed to contradict this. He attempted to go upstairs for a nap but couldn’t; he tried, cautiously, to eat Christmas lunch, and was unsuccessful.

Therefore, before I could even 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 much of a delay would there be on Christmas Day?

A Deteriorating Condition

By the time we got there, he’d gone from poorly to hardly aware. Fellow patients assisted us help him reach a treatment area, where the generic smell of institutional meals and air permeated the space.

The atmosphere, however, was unique. One could see valiant efforts at holiday cheer everywhere you looked, even with the pervasive depressing and institutional feel; tinsel hung from drip stands and portions of holiday pudding went cold on bedside tables.

Cheerful nurses, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were moving busily and using that lovely local expression so unique to the area: “duck”.

A Subdued Return Home

After our time at the hospital concluded, we made our way home to lukewarm condiments and holiday television. We saw a lighthearted program 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 it had begun to snow, and I remember having a sense of anticlimax – did we lose the holiday?

Healing and Reflection

Although our friend eventually recovered, he had actually punctured a lung and later developed DVT. And, while that Christmas isn’t a personal favourite, 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. True to his favorite phrase: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.