Most people shudder at the thought of working on Christmas Day. Not me. I’ve worked as a hospital doctor since 2000 and, most years, come 25 December, I’ll be doing the ward round. As a junior doctor, I didn’t have much choice about doing the Christmas Day shift. But since becoming a consultant, I have usually volunteered for Christmas, and am used to working when others are tucking into their turkey and opening their presents.
How lonely must those souls be to regard staying on the wards as festive?
I recall being bad tempered one early start, knowing I was missing my two young kids’ excitement, but otherwise the pattern has been a joy. For all its failings, the NHS has a capacity for camaraderie. Staff are almost never competing for money or employment, and that, combined with sharing a worthwhile goal, is conducive to fellow feeling. We really are in it together, especially at Christmas.
The day itself is usually quiet, but not like it was. Even ten or fifteen years ago, hospitals would empty out. A slew of departures in the days before left the wards half empty. As a junior, I would arrange to buy presents for our few remaining patients – I remember an old man’s delight at a bottle of malt – and, for once, we could be generous with discharges. Some of the elderly and isolated would shyly ask if they could stay in hospital for Christmas, even though they were ready for release; we would oblige. They would coo with pleasure at the prospect of the ward Christmas lunch.
Diffident and hopeful, those requests haunt me a little. To regard NHS catering as a treat says something fearful about what life has done to your expectations. How lonely must those souls be to regard staying on the wards – where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs – as festive? Most of my patients are elderly, none have books. They sit or lie in vacant silence, with an unregarded television blaring, as they must live. But they smile when you visit them.
These days, the hospitals no longer empty out. They remain as full as ever, crammed with the sick and with those frail and unregarded figures. Have family bonds loosened, to make this so? The thought is unpleasant to contemplate, as distasteful as the deliquescing vegetable cubes that appear on NHS supper trays. Our nets of care have frayed, and hospitals catch what the world lets fall. The result is a busyness that has become permanent.
Although the wards are now often full on Christmas Day, there is still a lull, all the more precious since fierce chaos will quickly have its revenge. Sometimes on Boxing Day, sometimes not until the Bank Holidays are done, the ambulances flood in. Then the unfortunate pile up in the corridors. Overcrowding and delay add cruelty to misery.
Still, the seasonal camaraderie persists awhile. Staff wear Christmas jumpers and hats, and fake trees and tinsel abound. Joys are no less worth celebrating for being brief. As the Welsh priest and poet R S Thomas wrote:
I have seen the sun break through/ to illuminate a small field/ for a while, and gone my way/ and forgotten it. But that was the/ pearl of great price, the one field that had/ treasure in
Christmas is a reminder of hope, but also of brevity; it never lasts. Supermarkets soon replace Advent calendars with Easter eggs. I recall a junior doctor writing in a medical journal of their attempt to brighten one Christmas Day by enthusiastically bidding everyone, when lunch arrived, to ‘eat, drink, and be merry’, before one patient completed the proverb.
Death, like life, is always with us
I’ve loved my time on the wards, but it has come at a price. I love to cook, but have never cooked Christmas dinner; work has always stopped me. For years, I have dreamt of going through the rituals I have so long heard about, of early starts peeling potatoes and preparing sprouts, of hours tinkering in the kitchen while the yells of children compete with the sound of the stereo playing carols or Handel’s Messiah.
This year, for the first time, I will roast my own turkey. I had been due to work, but colleagues took up my shifts when my son died unexpectedly just before Advent. There is nothing actually ironic about death intruding on festivities, although it is a cliché to pretend otherwise. Death, like life, is always with us, and the two do not cancel out.
“God has given us wit and flavour, and brightness and laughter, and perfumes to enliven the days of man’s pilgrimage,” said Sydney Smith, “and to charm his pained steps over the burning marl.” Christmas days working in the hospital, for me, have long done the same. I hope they shall again.
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