E.T. Phone Home

E.T.

If you think this quote is correct than you display what’s called the Mandela Effect.

According to MedicalNewsToday, the Mandela effect is when a group of people misremembers a historical event or person. Writer and researcher Fiona Broome coined the term over a decade ago when she created a website detailing her recollections of former South African President Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Nelson Mandela did not die in prison in the 1980s. After serving 27 years in prison, Mandela became president of South Africa from 1994–1999. He died in 2013. Despite this, Broome thought she remembered international news coverage of Mandela’s death in the 1980s. She found other people who shared these false memories.

E.T. apparently never said E.T. Phone Home, but E.T. Home Phone. – So much for our collective memory.

I’ll get back to phone matters and memory.

First I need to say a huge, huge thank you to Marie and her family who went out of their way to organise their famous Coffee Morning for Caring for Pádraig. Except for the bad COVID years, this has been an annual event since Pádraig’s accident. It became the annual rally call for his support and a meeting point for all the different people who know about Pádraig’s accident.

For the first time since it started, this year the Coffee Morning was hit by really bad weather. But despite the constant downpour, there was a constant stream of people arriving, meeting up with their friends and buying everything from the most luxurious cakes that had been donated, to honey (as organic as the bees can make it) from a friend labelled Le gach dea ghui de Pádraig Schaler, with all the best from Pádraig Schaler, to raffle tickets in the hope of winning some of the fabulous hampers and other fantastic prizes prepared by Marie’s family.

It is because of the generosity of family, friends, and neighbours, that Pádraig was able to attend hospital and therapy services in Germany during the pandemic when his hip caused him very considerable pain, or the therapy services in a specialised Neurophysio clinic in the North of Spain this Easter.

We are so grateful to sll the hard work Marie and her entire family put into the preparation and running of the Coffee Morning in their house, and to everybody who came despite the torrential rain on the day. Pádraig will make good use of the donations made to continue to live his life with his injury.

This week I went to RehaCare in Düsseldorf, the world’s largest Rehab Fair. It too had been cancelled for the past two years and I was eager to see if there were any new supports Pádraig and those with similar injuries could use.

I wasn’t disappointed. Exhibitors showed off products I would not have found anywhere else.

Coming back to phone matters.

We had bought a mobile phone with big buttons for our elderly neighbour John. Sadly, he died recently. We decided to let Pádraig have a go on the phone. To our surprise, Pádraig not only was able to dial the numbers, but he straight away dialled mine – the first mobile phone number in the house. But he also remembered his number, and that of other family members.

Be honest – how many phone numbers do you remember?

For me, this was yet another example that many of Pádraig’s abilities are restricted because we do not provide him with the support he needs to do what we all do, like ringing their family and friends.

We discover what he can do by accident because we do not know what he can do.

Expect a phone call from Pádraig in the near future.