You can walk down the aisle without getting knocked over. At 300km/hour. You get your favourite newspaper and your favourite coffee served to your seat. You can access the internet (though here you need to be patient:) and cover the 600km from Mannheim in the south of Germany to Hamburg in just over 4 hours. On ‘green’ electricity. It’s not surprising that I wouldn’t have got a seat, had my friend not reserved one well in advance I managed to eventually buy the ticket. I am getting all nostalgic thinking about Iarnród Éireann, Irish Rail, and the good auld Limerick train. I knew most of the people on that train, some of them by name, some became friends over the years. I was following the conductor’s golf tours through Spain, and had great conversations with American tourist about their search for their ancestral homes. The Intercity-Express, or ICE, is – despite all the jokes about ‘Deutsche Bahn’ – a fantastic train. You wonder what would have happened to house prices and the economy in general if a high-speed train network had been built in Ireland…

Pádraig today did not tolerate the speech valve that well and they had to time short that he could use it. I suppose there are good days and bad days. He also did not sit out because the physio was by herself and needs a second person to assist her to move Pádraig into the wheelchair.  On the positive side (which is what we are all focusing on!) he really seems to have maintained his ‘sweet tooth’ and taste: when someone today wet his lips and tongue with some sweet stuff, his tongue and mouth really got going.

Before I forget: I wanted to thank my friends in the CNGL @ DCU for the coffee morning they organised for Pádraig yesterday morning, special thanks to Laura all who brought in all of these really nice looking cakes!

Another thought crossed my mind recently: when I came to Ireland in the second half of the 1980s, a lot of the issues that had been ‘issues’ in the Germany I grew up in, became issues in my new ‘Heimat’. One after the other: the de-criminalisation of condoms and other means of contraception; the de-criminalisation of homosexuality (though even I am not old enough to remember that having been an issue in Germany); the divorce referendum; and the heated discussion around abortion. Now people in Germany tell me that 20 years ago, adequate rehab and, especially, neuro-rehab services were not readily available in the country. People who had the means and the ‘get-up-and-go’ brought their family member in need of neuro rehab services to Switzerland.

Maybe now is the time to share the lessons learned around early neuro rehab in countries such as Germany and build an adequate service in Ireland. Pádraig’s experience and that of many other young patients who spent months, some of them years, in an acute hospital, were then treated – if they were lucky – for a very short period of time, just a few months, in the NRH, just to be returned to an acute ward or to a nursing home, without adequate care and therapies – this experience has to end and should never be repeated.

Knowing that families of young brain injured patients are worried out of their mind for their loved once because they see that, instead of receiving adequate care and therapy in adequate surroundings, they are left semi-abondaned and semi-forgotten about by the ‘system’ (because they are considered to be a ‘bad investment’), and not doing anything about it, is shameful.

Would you support the setting up of a house where severely brain injured young people could be cared for adequately? Would you help us with a campaign to raise awareness, to secure funding, and to convince the relevant agencies to support this initiative?

What do you think? What does your family, your friends think? Could that be a ‘go’?

We can’t bring the ICE to Ireland, but we can change the way people are being looked after when they most need our help.