🔗 Share this article I Drove a Family Friend to the Emergency Room – and he went from unwell to scarcely conscious during the journey. This individual has long been known as a truly outsized figure. Sharp and not prone to sentiment – and hardly ever declining to another brandy. During family gatherings, he is the person gossiping about the most recent controversy to involve a regional politician, or regaling us with tales 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, prior to heading off to our own plans. However, one holiday season, roughly a decade past, when he was planning to join family abroad, he fell down the stairs, holding a drink in one hand, a suitcase gripped in the other, and broke his ribs. Medical staff had treated him and instructed him to avoid flying. So, here he was back with us, doing his best to manage, but seeming progressively worse. As Time Passed Time passed, yet the stories were not coming in their typical fashion. He maintained that he felt alright but his appearance suggested otherwise. He attempted to go upstairs for a nap but found he could not; he tried, carefully, to eat Christmas lunch, and failed. Therefore, before I could even put on a festive hat, my mum and I decided to drive him to the emergency room. We thought about calling an ambulance, but how long would that take on Christmas Day? A Rapid Decline By the time we got there, his state had progressed from poorly to hardly aware. Fellow patients assisted us help him reach a treatment area, where the characteristic scent of institutional meals and air filled the air. What was distinct, however, was the mood. People were making brave attempts at festive gaiety everywhere you looked, despite the underlying sterile and miserable mood; festive strands were attached to medical equipment and portions of holiday pudding went cold on nightstands. Positive medical attendants, who no doubt would far rather have been at home, were bustling about and using that great term of endearment so particular to the area: “duck”. Heading Home for Leftovers Once the permitted time ended, we headed home to lukewarm condiments and holiday television. We viewed something silly on television, probably Agatha Christie, and engaged in an even sillier game, 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 – was Christmas effectively over for us? The Aftermath and the Story Even though he ultimately healed, he had truly experienced a lung puncture and subsequently contracted a serious circulatory condition. And, even if that particular Christmas is not my most cherished memory, it has become part of family legend 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 the story’s yearly repetition 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”.