🔗 Share this article

Our family friend has always been a truly outsized personality. Witty, unsentimental – and never one to refuse to another brandy. Whenever our families celebrated, he is the person gossiping about the newest uproar to catch up with a regional politician, or amusing us with accounts of the shameless infidelity of assorted players from the local club for forty years.

It was common for us to pass the morning of Christmas Day with him and his family, then departing for our own celebrations. But, one Christmas, some ten years back, when he was planning to join family abroad, he tumbled down the staircase, holding a drink in one hand, his luggage in the other, and fractured his ribs. The hospital had patched him up and advised against air travel. Thus, he found himself back with us, making the best of it, but seeming progressively worse.

The Day Progressed

Time passed, yet the anecdotes weren’t flowing like they normally did. He maintained that he felt alright but his condition seemed to contradict this. He attempted to go upstairs for a nap but found he could not; he tried, carefully, to eat Christmas lunch, and was unsuccessful.

Therefore, before I could even don any celebratory headwear, my mum and I decided to get him to the hospital.

The idea of calling for an ambulance crossed our minds, but what would the wait time be on Christmas Day?

A Deteriorating Condition

Upon our arrival, he had moved from being poorly to hardly aware. Other outpatients helped us help him reach a treatment area, where the characteristic scent of clinical cuisine and atmosphere was noticeable.

The atmosphere, however, was unique. There were heroic attempts at festive gaiety in every direction, despite the underlying clinical and somber atmosphere; tinsel hung from drip stands and dishes of festive dessert sat uneaten on nightstands.

Positive medical attendants, who certainly would have chosen to be at home, were bustling about and using that charming colloquial address so peculiar to the area: “duck”.

A Subdued Return Home

When visiting hours were over, we returned home to cold bread sauce and festive TV programming. We watched something daft on television, likely a mystery drama, and took part in a more foolish pastime, 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

Although our friend eventually recovered, he had in fact suffered a punctured lung and subsequently contracted deep vein thrombosis. And, although that holiday isn’t a personal favourite, it has become part of family legend as “the Christmas I saved a life”.

Whether that’s strictly true, or a little bit of dramatic licence, I couldn’t possibly comment, but its annual retelling certainly hasn’t hurt my ego. In keeping with our friend’s motto: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.