Today I reminded myself that I need to plan stuff and then follow that plan, check on progress, and – most importantly – cut down the list to a manageable level. It’s easy to get me going on exciting ideas, at times there are so many brilliant ideas that it is difficult to let some of them go. For years, if not decades, I’ve periodically decided to cut down on things and to concentrate on what are the important things, the really important things, and to start moving away from what just looks important. Needless to say, I never managed to do this. There were four exceptions: when each of our kids were born, and last June. In a weird, wonderful, sad, and amazing way, Pádraig is giving me the courage to do what he once wrote to me when he was a kid. (I’ll get back to that another day.)

Nurses and doctors are so supportive of Pádraig, it’s nothing short of amazing. They share our believe that he is making progress and are telling him and us to be patient, to recognize even the smallest step of progress and to realize how all these small steps will be adding up to one giant leap for Pádraig one day. They continue to work on the speech valve and his swallowing and are planning to increase the time he uses the valve instead of the ‘standard’ breathing through the trache over time. A doctor today said that his leg and foot are definitely getting smaller, slowly but surely, which means that he is dealing well with the thrombosis. Another really important change over the past week or two is that Pádraig’s heart rate came down what I would call almost dramatically to close to normal. It’s hard to say why this is happening, but it can only be good. Friends keep visiting, keeping him company, and many are in touch with us planning their visits to Hamburg. It is a truly humbling experience. The energy, the love, the support, the good humour in what are really sometimes desperate times, the believe in a better future – if man can shape destiny, Pádraig will go down in history as the prime example of what friends can make happen for you.

In the meantime, I have started to work on three important issues that I believe have to be raised in connection with Pádraig’s accident:

1. the empty promise of insurance companies to young students going on a J1 to the US, and how they can be rained in;
2. the open season declared on bicycles on Cape Cod, and how that can be stopped;
3. the lack of adequate care and support for ABI patients in Ireland, and how that can be improved.

We believe that the SUI will take up the issue of insurance; I am in the process of writing an article for a well-know publication in the Boston area on accidents involving bicycles on Cape Cod; we managed to get some press coverage on what I would call forced emigration of patients from Ireland.

Unless you work in computing or localization, you might not be too familiar with Unicode and ISO 10646, both encoding system for international characters for the digital world. You might not be too familiar with ISO either, although this is one of the world’s most important standard committees. Well, through dealing and wheeling, Ireland’s representative on the 10646 committee managed to get the ISO to agree that they would provide digital encoding for Ogham – an ancient Irish writing system. One of Pádraig’s friends left a message for him and a reminder to stay strong: it Ogham, and it says Sláinte, Health.

Today’s German Music Tip
Hannes Wader, Dat du min leefst büst (1974). One of Hannes Wader’s most beautiful songs in ‘Plattdeutsch’, the language (the dialect?) of Northern Germany.
What’s hot
Sláinte
What’s cold
Breoiteachta
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Illegale Steuertricks (from the recent cover of the Spiegel magazine)

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