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This individual has long been known as a bigger-than-life character. Clever and unemotional – and not one to say no to an extra drink. At family parties, he is the person chatting about the most recent controversy to involve a regional politician, or regaling us with tales of the notorious womanizing of various Sheffield Wednesday players during the last four decades.

We would often spend Christmas morning with him and his family, prior to heading off to our own plans. But, one Christmas, some ten years back, when he was planning to join family abroad, he took a fall on the steps, whisky in one hand, his luggage in the other, and broke his ribs. The hospital had patched him up and instructed him to avoid flying. Consequently, he ended up back with us, making the best of it, but looking increasingly peaky.

The Day Progressed

The hours went by, however, the humorous tales were absent like they normally did. He insisted he was fine but his appearance suggested otherwise. He tried to make it upstairs for a nap but was unable to; he tried, gingerly, to eat Christmas lunch, and was unsuccessful.

Thus, prior to me managing to put on a festive hat, my mum and I decided to get him to the hospital.

We considered summoning an ambulance, but what would the wait time be on Christmas Day?

A Deteriorating Condition

When we finally reached the hospital, he had moved from being poorly to hardly aware. Other outpatients helped us get him to a ward, where the characteristic scent of institutional meals and air filled the air.

Different though, was the spirit. People were making brave attempts at holiday cheer everywhere you looked, despite the underlying clinical and somber atmosphere; decorations dangled from IV poles and bowls of Christmas pudding congealed on bedside tables.

Positive medical attendants, 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”.

A Subdued Return Home

Once the permitted time ended, we made our way home to cold bread sauce and Christmas telly. We watched something daft on television, perhaps a detective story, and engaged in an even sillier game, such as a local version of the board game.

By then it was quite late, and it had begun to snow, and I remember having a sense of anticlimax – was Christmas effectively over for us?

Recovery and Retrospection

Even though he ultimately healed, he had truly experienced a lung puncture and went on to get a serious circulatory condition. And, while that Christmas is not my most cherished memory, 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 hearing it told each year certainly hasn’t hurt my ego. True to his favorite phrase: “don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story”.