24 Hours in A&E

26-year-old Nicholas has been punched in the face in a random attack – his jaw is fractured and dislocated and he can’t close his mouth or speak. Consultant Craniofacial Surgeon Rob, a world-renowned specialist, puts Nicholas’s jaw back in place with his ‘magic thumb’. With Nicholas is his long-term girlfriend, Holly. “He’s definitely not the fighting type. When I first met him, for sure, he was a boy,” she says. “Sometimes I feel a bit like a mum – ‘Can you slow down? Don’t run or you’re going to hurt yourself!’.” Tyrell has damaged his big toe playing football. The 17-year-old’s blackened toe-nail needs removing and his dad, Adrian, uses the opportunity to lecture him that experiencing pain is what separates men from boys and about the importance of knowing his family tree as well as he knows Spanish football. Ho, 26, has brought his 78-year-old grandma Amoui to King’s after finding her collapsed in her flat. Amoui came to Britain during the Vietnam war and she’s been like a mother to Ho. The thought of losing her is almost too much for her grandson to bear. “It was a shock when I found my grandma…I’ve never seen her so fragile before,” he says. “She’s a tough lady, she’s like Margaret Thatcher. She looked after me always and so I felt I have the responsibility to go and look after her.” Consultant Rob, the first person in his family to go to university – “or, for that matter, to do an A level” - recalls his own rite of passage to becoming a man, with his father, who left school at thirteen to work in a brick yard to support his family. “There is a time in your life that is unspoken, when your responsibilities change from your parents to you,” he says. “I remember standing at the side of my father’s car and he gave me the car keys… and something in that unspoken act said that was the transition.”