Here is Pádraig walking. (The video is not great because the person trying to record it, recorded it by accident moving really fast. I had to slow down the playback speed which interfered with the quality of the recording.)

I have started to read Pádraig short stories in the evening. I experienced this during our journey to Lourdes and felt it was a brilliant way to finish the day. I looked for short stories on the internet and found a few websites that got me going.

On one of those sites they also had proverbs and aphorisms. There was one Chinese proverb that reminded me of my final pedagogy exams in college which were all about how to engage students not by telling them about whatever you wanted to teach them, not by showing them, but by involving them. This Chines proverb was in German, here is my English translation: If you want to find out about something, ask someone with experience, not a scholar.

Just by coincidence, this proverb also reflects what the co-owner of the rehab centre told me today with incredible passion, i.e. that there is very little recent scientific research into how to successfully treat severe acquired brain injury. To be fair to her: she said there is none. She said that this is the case because ‘scientist’ working with very well defined ‘experiments’ can not establish the conditions under which independent, repeatable and measurable ‘experiments’ or observations can be made in relation to that treatment. This is what the scholars have told her, the practitioner.

She knows what needs to be done to support the recovery of sABI survivors. I know what Pádraig needs. Maybe not all of what he needs, but I have a pretty clear picture. I have almost four years of experience of him being treated, of seeing how others like hime respond to certain types of treatment.

For example, today we walked Pádraig across the full length of the therapy room with me supporting him on his back and the main therapist supporting his knees and moving his feet. It was the smoothest thing ever. We could not have done this without Pádraig’s support. We tried but could not have done this late last year. – This is experience. How would you ‘measure’ in a ‘pure science’-type experimental setup?

According to what I heard today it seems as if we needed to find new ways of capturing progress made by survivors in order to proof that therapy is essential to recovery. Would common sense be to ‘common’ and not sufficiently ‘scientific’? Should we establish what is going on with those who are having the experience rather than with those who think they understand because the studied?