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He has always been a man of a larger than life personality. Sharp and not prone to sentiment – and not one to say no to a further glass. During family gatherings, he’s the one chatting about the newest uproar to catch up with a regional politician, or amusing us with accounts of the outrageous philandering of various Sheffield Wednesday players during the last four decades.

We would often spend Christmas morning with him and his family, then departing for our own celebrations. Yet, on a particular Christmas, roughly a decade past, when he was supposed to be meeting family abroad, he took a fall on the steps, holding a drink in one hand, a suitcase gripped in the other, and broke his ribs. He was treated at the hospital and instructed him to avoid flying. So, here he was back with us, making the best of it, but appearing more and more unwell.

The Morning Rolled On

Time passed, yet the humorous tales were absent as they usually were. He insisted he was fine but his condition seemed to contradict this. He attempted to go upstairs 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 mother and I made the choice to drive him to the emergency room.

We considered summoning an ambulance, but how much of a delay would there be on Christmas Day?

A Rapid Decline

When we finally reached the hospital, he had moved from being peaky to barely responsive. Fellow patients assisted us get him to a ward, where the generic smell of hospital food and wind permeated the space.

Different though, was the spirit. People were making brave attempts at festive gaiety in every direction, even with the pervasive sterile and miserable mood; festive strands were attached to medical equipment and portions of holiday pudding went cold on tables next to the beds.

Cheerful nurses, who certainly would have chosen to be at home, were bustling about and using that great term of endearment so peculiar to the area: “duck”.

Heading Home for Leftovers

After our time at the hospital concluded, we headed home to lukewarm condiments and festive TV programming. We watched something daft on television, perhaps a detective story, and played something even dafter, such as a regionally-themed property trading game.

It was already late, and it had begun to snow, and I remember having a sense of anticlimax – did we lose the holiday?

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, while that Christmas isn’t a personal favourite, it has gone down in family lore as “the Christmas I saved a life”.

If that is completely accurate, or a little bit of dramatic licence, is not for me to definitively say, but the story’s yearly repetition has definitely been good for my self-esteem. And, as our friend always says: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.