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This individual has long been known as a bigger-than-life character. Clever and unemotional – and hardly ever declining to a further glass. At family parties, he’s the one chatting about the latest scandal to befall a local MP, or amusing us with accounts of the notorious womanizing of various Sheffield Wednesday players for forty years.

Frequently, we would share the morning of Christmas Day with him and his family, prior to heading off to our own plans. However, one holiday season, some ten years back, when he was planning to join family abroad, he tumbled down the staircase, with a glass of whisky in hand, a suitcase gripped in the other, and broke his ribs. He was treated at the hospital and told him not to fly. So, here he was back with us, making the best of it, but seeming progressively worse.

The Day Progressed

Time passed, yet the anecdotes weren’t flowing as they usually were. He insisted he was fine but he didn’t look it. He tried to make it upstairs for a nap but couldn’t; he tried, carefully, to eat Christmas lunch, and did not manage.

So, before I’d so much as don any celebratory headwear, my mother and I made the choice to take him to A&E.

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 unwell to almost unconscious. People in the waiting room aided us get him to a ward, where the generic smell of clinical cuisine and atmosphere permeated the space.

What was distinct, however, was the mood. One could see valiant efforts at Christmas spirit everywhere you looked, despite the underlying sterile and miserable mood; festive strands were attached to medical equipment and dishes of festive dessert sat uneaten on tables next to the beds.

Cheerful nurses, who certainly would have chosen to be at home, were bustling about and using that charming colloquial address so particular to the area: “duck”.

A Quiet Journey Back

After our time at the hospital concluded, we returned home to lukewarm condiments and holiday television. We watched something daft on television, perhaps a detective story, and played something even dafter, such as a local version of the board game.

It was already late, and snowing, and I remember feeling deflated – was Christmas effectively over for us?

Recovery and Retrospection

Although our friend eventually recovered, he had truly experienced a lung puncture and went on to get a serious circulatory condition. And, even if that particular Christmas does not rank among my favorites, it has become part of family legend as “the Christmas I saved a life”.

If that is completely accurate, or involves a degree of exaggeration, is not for me to definitively say, but its annual retelling has done no damage to my pride. In keeping with our friend’s motto: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.