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This individual has long been known as a bigger-than-life character. Sharp and not prone to sentiment – and hardly ever declining to an extra drink. Whenever our families celebrated, he’s the one discussing the most recent controversy to befall a regional politician, or entertaining us with stories of the shameless infidelity of various Sheffield Wednesday players during the last four decades.

We would often spend the holiday morning with him and his family, then departing for our own celebrations. However, one holiday season, some ten years back, when he was supposed to be meeting family abroad, he tumbled down the staircase, whisky in one hand, suitcase in the other, and fractured 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 Morning Rolled On

Time passed, yet the humorous tales were absent in their typical fashion. He insisted he was fine but he didn’t look it. He tried to make it upstairs for a nap but was unable to; he tried, gingerly, to eat Christmas lunch, and did not manage.

So, before I’d so much as put on a festive hat, we resolved to drive him to the emergency room.

We considered summoning an ambulance, but how long would that take on Christmas Day?

A Rapid Decline

When we finally reached the hospital, he’d gone from poorly to hardly aware. Fellow patients assisted us help him reach a treatment area, where the generic smell of clinical cuisine and atmosphere filled the air.

Different though, was the spirit. There were heroic attempts at holiday cheer all around, even with the pervasive sterile and miserable mood; tinsel hung from drip stands and bowls of Christmas pudding congealed on bedside tables.

Positive medical attendants, who undoubtedly would have preferred to be at home, were bustling about and using that lovely local expression so peculiar to the area: “duck”.

Heading Home for Leftovers

When visiting hours were over, we headed home to cold bread sauce and Christmas telly. We watched something daft on television, likely a mystery drama, 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 – had we missed Christmas?

Recovery and Retrospection

Although our friend eventually recovered, he had in fact suffered a punctured lung and later developed a serious circulatory condition. And, although that holiday does not rank among my favorites, it has become part of family legend as “the Christmas I saved a life”.

How factual that statement is, or a little bit of dramatic licence, is not for me to definitively say, but its annual retelling certainly hasn’t hurt my ego. True to his favorite phrase: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.