I had almost forgotten about it when I got the call from the lady working for the “Sanitätshaus”. They do exist in Ireland too, the “Sanitätshäuser”, I think, but they function in a different way. In Ireland, they just sell stuff: wheelchairs, walking aids and he like. In Germany, they come to the hospital, assess the person who needs the ‘stuff’, they source it, and they organise all the paperwork with the health insurance, the public health insurance, would you believe.

She called because we had an appointment with a rep from a company that sell shower and toilet chairs. I had met him at the fair in Düsseldorf and now he was coming to the Schön-Klinik to demo the chair. For Pádraig. Isn’t that amazing. So we spent about half an hour checking it out, thinking about the different support ad-ons Pádraig would need, measuring it, taking pictures as a reminder.

Then I noticed that Pádraig’s room, just a few metres down the corridor got very busy. Doctors, nurses, equipment. So I went down to the room. They had taken a routine EEG and a junior doctor had noticed some irregular brain activity. She then called the senior doctor who confirmed that there was something undesired going on that was not (yet) visible by observing Pádraig, but it had started in his brain.

It was back to a drip, a third anti-seizure drug, and an upping of the anti-seizure medication he had already been on for some time now. It was a bit of a deja vu. Almost exactly two weeks ago, after almost exactly the same number of days after day one of the ‘wake-me-up’ drugs, the injured part of Pádraig’s brain was going into overdrive. It was good that they discovered this early enough this time and were able to avoid another trip to the ICU.

Pádraig’s senior doctor came in then a bit later and explained that this was more than likely the end of the drug ‘trial’. He believes, and I kind of agree with him, that it was good to try a second drug after the first had caused the problems. But trying it a third time does probably not make that much sense.

What he is going to do now is to propose to the surgeons in the UKE to try and fix his head bone that hasn’t grown together as we had hoped. And, by the looks of it, that’ll be that.

I had an empty kind of feeling tonight. The end of something. The beginning of something else. Into the wild.