I Drove a Close Friend of the Family to the Emergency Room – and he went from unwell to scarcely conscious on the way.
This individual has long been known as a truly outsized figure. Clever and unemotional – and not one to say no to another brandy. At family parties, he is the person gossiping about the latest scandal to befall a member of parliament, or regaling us with tales of the shameless infidelity of assorted players from the local club for forty years.
Frequently, we would share the holiday morning with him and his family, then departing for our own celebrations. However, one holiday season, about 10 years ago, when he was scheduled to meet family abroad, he fell down the stairs, whisky in one hand, suitcase in the other, and sustained broken ribs. The hospital had patched him up and told him not to fly. Consequently, he ended up back with us, making the best of it, but seeming progressively worse.
The Morning Rolled On
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 was unable to; he tried, carefully, to eat Christmas lunch, and failed.
Therefore, before I could even placed a party hat on my head, my mum and I decided to get him to the hospital.
We thought about calling an ambulance, but how long would that take on Christmas Day?
A Rapid Decline
By the time we got there, he’d gone from peaky to barely responsive. Other outpatients helped us get him to a ward, where the generic smell of clinical cuisine and atmosphere filled the air.
What was distinct, however, was the mood. There were heroic attempts at holiday cheer all around, despite the underlying sterile and miserable mood; decorations dangled from IV poles and dishes of festive dessert sat uneaten on bedside tables.
Positive medical attendants, who no doubt would far rather have been 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 cold bread sauce and holiday television. We viewed something silly on television, perhaps a detective story, and played something even dafter, such as Sheffield’s take on Monopoly.
By then it was quite late, and snowing, and I remember experiencing a letdown – was Christmas effectively over for us?
Recovery and Retrospection
While our friend did get better in time, he had actually punctured a lung and went on to get deep vein thrombosis. And, although that holiday 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 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”.
