A nurse had to tell me. I hadn’t even noticed. The good news.

If you look closely, you’ll see that the ‘green card’ is green on just one side, and red on the other. It hangs right beside his bed. They had shown the red side until yesterday. Until the hospital had received the results of several tests they had carried out on Pádraig to make sure he didn’t have any infections (including any of these not so peasant hospital bugs).

The good news is: he doesn’t have any. Hence the green card.

Like everywhere else, like in any other place, it takes a little time to settle and to get to know the neighbours and the shops. We are slowly getting the hang of it. Finding our way around the therapy centre/hospital. Organising showers, food, some kind of daily routine.

Pádraig took part today again in the course for therapists in F.O.T.T., and there will be a third day. We walked through the therapy centre to the training unit, passing by other wards, across a beautiful inside bridge and into the room where the training is taking place.

All of a sudden, I had a flashback from the time we were in the Schön-Klinik when Pádraig was not allowed to go for a walk in the hospital grounds or take part in any communal activities because he did have hospital bugs and because the senior doctor didn’t want him to leave the ward because he didn’t want any “dead bodies in the hospital grounds”. It was four years ago, around this time of the year when Pádraig would have loved so much to smell different smells, here different voices, hear dogs barking and kids screaming.

How things have changed.