Today Maria and I left early for Hamburg. The senior doctor in the Schön-Klinik had made a special arrangement for her to see Pádraig at 1pm, two hours prior to the start of the official visiting time at 3pm, as she had to leave for the airport at 2pm. (Yes, it is and doesn’t just sound complicated.) For the first 45 minutes, traffic was like every other day: pretty light. Once we hit the A23 motorway at Heide, we thought we were doing fine. There are two long road works on this motorway, with an expected completion date of summer 2015! We had just driven into the first road works when traffic stopped. Completely. A car had broken down, apparently, blocking the one lane available to traffic. When we got going again, we knew we had to go directly to the airport. We had to skip Maria’s visit to the hospital. I told Pádraig about the traffic jam, and that Maria would be back soon. I am sure he understood.

Some more small details that make a hospital stay different here: we were used to bring in Pádraig’s own mouth cleaning ‘sticks’ (we bought them in our local pharmacy, and

It gets very dark very early in Hamburg – the Schön-Klinik in the afternoon.

the nurses told us they were brilliant); deodorant (remember: 6 very sick people in one relatively small room, not always well aired?); cream to keep his skin in good condition; and other sundry ‘stuff’. Here, they have their own mouth hygiene sets in the hospital (even with little ‘hovers’ attached to prevent liquids going down the throat); there are no aerosol sprays and there is not need to cover up bad odours (there are none); and they have sets of different creams for his lips and his skin. In the Irish hospital, the tube  carrying oxygen and going into his throat was protected by a blue-coloured open half-moon-shape-like semi-cover; here the tube is closed and covered by an air filter: dust and bacteria would have a hard time getting into his lungs through that filter. The senior doctor consulted with the hospital’s dentist to organize a tooth guard as he is still grinding his teeth at times. (This was looked at previously as just another potential ‘collateral’ damage that could be dealt with later.)

To keep Pádraig in touch with Ireland, I play (Irish) music to him – I am under strict instructions not to play my music. (What is wrong with my music?) So I played music from a CD a very good friend had brought in some months ago: Bí Ann by Kila, Tír na nÓg, A-Team, Hall of Fame,… by the time we reached Mexico (as Gaeilge) by Mundi he was sweating, his heart rate was up, …and something or someone had moved the gadget on his finger measuring his oxygen saturation – which made several alarm bells go off all over the place: the system thought Pádraig’s oxygen had suddenly gone down from 96% (normal) to less than 80% (not good). The nurse came running into his room in a panic – by which time I had corrected the ‘error’ (and switched off the music). She took it quite well, I thought, and checked his other markers, since she was there now anyway. When she said that she didn’t like his temperature (just over 35o), I confessed that we had been listening to some music, and that I thought it had been the music that had brought up his heart beat and also probably his temperature: She looked at us, smiled, and said: must be ‘Tanzfieber’ then.

What’s hot
German music tip: Herbert Grönemeyer, Männer (1984) [He of Wolfgang Petersen’s movie Das Boot. A bit like a response to Ina Deter:)].
The coffee offered today by Pádraig’s student nurse.
Kilometres we have driven to-date (since Wed., 13 Nov): 1,647
What’s cold
Petrol prices – they ‘swing’ by 10 cent within one day.
Stacks of letters from the insurance company.
Traffic jams on the A23.
The German word of the day
Tanzfieber