Once I thought I saw you in a crowded hazy bar, dancing on the light from star to star. Far across the moonbeam I know that’s who you are, I saw your brown eyes turning once to fire. You are like a hurricane, there’s calm in your eye. And I’m gettin’ blown away to somewhere safer where the feeling stays. I want to love you but I’m getting blown away.

He was there!

Last night, in Dublin’s Conradh na Gaeilge club, a small crowd (100?, 200?) got together and connected across a thousand miles with Pádraig. When I looked at the Facebook page, the pictures and the video from the night, I had to think of Neil Young’s song from 1975, Like a Hurricane, and thought it would be a nice intro to today’s blog. Pádraig was right there in the middle, with his friends, bigger and taller than ever before, telling them to hang in there with him, to keep up the good spirit, to have fun and to make the world go spinning ’round. I will be back (with a bit of a German/Austrian accent:).

The fundraiser organized by his friends managed to raise an astonishing €4,277.70. Incredible! (The money will contribute to the cost of his transport to Germany and other ongoing expenses. More details on the evolving site: http://www.caringforPadraig.org).

Corrugated-iron-sheet-storms lodged sheets into trees on B202 between Tönning and Garding.

At the same time, Pat and I were driving through a hurricane, Xaver was his name. Good thing was that there was little traffic. Bad thing was that lots of roads were closed, including a stretch between Tönning and Garding, just about 10 km from Tating where we stay. This morning, we found out why when we looked it up in the local newspaper: the wind had lifted off the roofs from garages and sheds, and corrugated iron sheets had  been sent flying through the air like magic carpets. They cut off bushes and were lodged cut into trees – being caught in this storm of flying corrugated iron sheets would not have been nice…

We got home, eventually, and woke up this morning to inspect the damage at Pádraig’s favourite restaurant – built on stilts, and about a mile into the sea. My sister and her husband had owned this for more than 25 years, and when it was sold  a few years ago, Pádraig wanted me to by and run it. I did try, but (perhaps luckily) did not succeed. Although – it’s a magic place and completely out of this world!

Das war eine Nacht! Wilhelm! Nun überstehe ich alles.

Today’s German Music Tip
Die Toten Hosen, Freunde (2005) Check out the lyrics hier.
What’s hot
What a night!
What’s cold
Corrugated-iron-sheet-storms
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Das war eine Nacht! Wilhelm! Nun überstehe ich alles. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther.)

Twitter: @forPadraig
web: http://www.caringforPadraig.org
If you have videos or pictures of Pádraig you would like to share, please email them to me and I’ll upload them to the website.

You can go to extremes with impossible schemes. You can laugh when your dreams fall apart at the seams. And life gets more exciting with each passing day. And love is either in your heart, or on it’s way. – Where do dreams end, where do they start? What does somebody do for whom the normal life, the normal job, the normal career – are just too normal?

Haus 2, 4th floor

A thousand miles away, there is a group of people getting together tonight because of Pádraig. They are meeting up in his favourite haunt. I am sure there is nothing in the world he would llke more than being right in the middle of it. And I am sure that the day will come when we will organize the biggest party the Conradh has ever seen! Tonight, while he cannot be there in person, he will be there with his friends in spirit.

Given the collapsed lung from 2 days ago and the subsequent small operation to put in a drainage to get his left lung back working properly, he was doing well today. Pat is back, having arrived to Hamburg following a 22-hour odyssey through hurricane-struck northern Europe. When she came, took his hands, and talked to him, he was clearly reacting to her arrival, and happy to have her by his side.

Seosamh and myself getting into Hamburg yesterday – joke. These are two ‘brave’ people somewhere in the north of Germany, trying to ‘hold-on’.

Last night, when we were waiting for Pat, getting note of one stopped and diverted train after another, a good old-but-young-at-heart friend of Pádraig and myself were talking the night away. It was the night of the Hamburg Hurricane and we knew that in coming decades people will be asking “and where were you at the night of the famous Hamburg hurricane?” I will never forget this night, as many of you will probably not forget tonight. Keep the energy going, because:

Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you if you’re young at heart. For it’s hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind if you’re young at heart. Pádraig will be right in the middle again one of these days. Our and his dreams will never fall apart at the seems.

Today’s German Music Tip
Die Ärzte, Lass die Leute Reden (2007). Check out the lyrics here.
Today’s non-German Music Tip
Tom Waits or Frank Sinatra (whoever you like better), Young at Heart. Written for the film of the same name, released in 1954, and sung by Frank Sinatra. Check out the  lyrics.
What’s hot
Friends, friends, friends
What’s cold
Closed roads, closed bridges, snow storms
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Land unter

Twitter: @forPadraig
web: http://www.caringforPadraig.org
If you have videos or pictures of Pádraig you would like to share, please email them to me and I’ll upload them to the website.

It’s official: Ireland is the best country in the world, for business. For the first time since the list was compiled in 2006, prestigious Forbes magazine placed Ireland first in its ranking of 145 nations, says the Irish Independent. “It is the only nation that ranks among the top 15% of countries in every one of the 11 metrics we examined to gauge the best countries. Ireland ranks near the very top for low tax burden, investor protection and personal freedom.”, says Forbes.

Today, the strongest storm of the century hit Germany: Pat’s flight to Hamburg was cancelled; she re-scheduled to Amsterdam; from there, she was going to get a train, that was cancelled… instead of arriving at 4pm, she will now arrive a 7am on Friday….

Even if you are not interested in the economy and all that, it’s worth, just for the laugh of it, to read the announcement of these great news on Forbes’ website. They say, and I am not making this up, that “Ireland’s recent troubles have made it more attractive for companies moving in. Nominal wages fell 17% between 2008 and 2011, which helped keep labor costs in check. Unemployment remains stubbornly high—a recent 12.8%—providing companies a large labor pool to pick from.” The cake on the icing: foreign investors pay virtually no tax and we all speak English. Not surprisingly, “U.S. firms invested $129.5 billion in Ireland between 2008 and 2012” representing “a greater total than had been invested in the previous 58 years combined. Ireland (…) attracted almost as much U.S. investment as all of developing Asia.

Pádraig is doing well, given the circumstances. I am sure that he was so happy to here a familiar voice, and in Irish, from one of his good friends he had been missing over the past week. We will need to remain hopeful, positive, supportive of his efforts.

Contrast the investment with the news about the “highly regrettable” decision (High Court Judge) by the HSE to admit liability for injuries suffered by patients in Irish hospitals, for the third time this week. Contrast that with the €666m cut in the health budget for 2014 which many predict will rise to €1b. Contrast this with a waiting time of one year for what i consider basic heath care and health services, such as in Pádraig’s case – a waiting time consultants in Germany described as unethical and grotesque. (I was thinking of Louise’s essays on business ethics and stakeholder theory, you might have read about earlier in her comments, when writing this.)

Today’s German Music Tip
Sido feat. Mark Forster, Einer dieser Steine (15 Nov 2013). 4.5m hits on youtube in 3 weeks isn’t bad for a German song…
What’s hot
Dedicated doctors
What’s cold
Storms
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Sturmflutwarnung

When Pat rang me to say that Laura had seen something about an accident involving Pádraig on Facebook, that she had rung the number on Cape Cod, and that he had, indeed, been very badly injured in a terrible accident, it was after midnight and I was about to go to bed in Sanya, on the Chinese island of Hainan, about 3,000km south of Beijing. I had been invited by the owner of a localization company to give a particular talk that she had seen me deliver at a different event, at her company’s 10th Anniversary Event. The title of the talk was ‘Skyfall’. Yes, ‘Skyfall’ as in the James Bond movie. The point of the talk was to show that the rise of community-driven social localisation could be interpreted to be the worst thing to happen to the mainstream business of localization (like the sky falling on top of it) – or it could be seen as a huge and exciting new opportunity.

When I arrived at the hospital today, I rang the bell for the ward, waited for a reply from the intercom, said I was visiting ‘Herrn Schäler’ – and was told to come in but sit for a few moment in the waiting area, because there were many nurses and doctors around. First I didn’t get the point that all this commotion was happening in Pádraig’s room. But then his visiting Irish friend came out and said that the were with Pádraig. After a few minutes of anxiety, a nurse came out and brought me to his room where they were just finishing with Pádraig. A doctor took me to her office to have a quiet talk (in Beaumont doctors don’t have offices where they can meet patients or relatives on the ward, and talks often took place either in the room, or on the corridor).

It turned out that Pádraig’s left lung had collapsed, in other words, he had had a spontaneous pneumothorax. At 15:30 his oxygen saturation had gone down to 70% (normal would have been 96-98%) and alarms had gone off on the ward. I could imagine what happened remembering the day I had moved the gauge on his finger: mayhem. Within about two hours they had checked him out, done an X-ray, diagnosed the pneumothorax, and assembled a team to insert a drainage (a rubber tube) into his thorax to extract the air around his lungs, air that had made his left lung collapse and that had put pressure on his inner organs and his heart. An hour later they had successfully completed the insertion of the tube  Another hour later, they had done a new X-ray confirming that his left lung was back at work and in a good shape. When I left the hospital at around 21:30, I was assured that he would fine and we would all be ok to go home and rest.

Skyfall starts with ‘this is the end’ (“like the song from the Doors”, I hear you saying:), but it ends on a really powerful note of being together, standing tall, facing it together, and getting out of the mess on the other side, starting anew. Today, again, was a bit of a Skyfall, but I know that we are together, standing tall, facing up to whatever is going to happen – and that we will get out of it on the other side, as strong and enthusiastic as ever.

Finally, we just launched a website: http://www.CaringForPadraig.org, where we tell the story of Pádraig’s accident; list events his friends are organizing for him; collect and make available pictures and videos of the events; as well as the ‘wishing Pádraig well’ messages from some famous Irish bands; and information on how to financially support the care for Pádraig.

-> There is a calendar of friends visiting Pádraig (please let me know if you want to be included:).
-> Follow us on Twitter: CaringForPadraig
-> Visit the new website and pass its address on to friends and family: http://www.CaringforPadraig.org — The website also has a Forum attached to it for open discussions in the group.

Today’s German Music Tip
Paul van Dyk and Peter Heppner, Wir sind wir (2004). Text made available in German and in English by the Goethe-Institute.
What’s hot
Drainage
What’s cold
Arriving home at 23:30
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
“Wir sind wir.
Das ist doch nur ein schlechter Lauf.
So schnell geben wir doch jetzt nicht auf.”
=> We won’t give up that quickly now. <=

Every day, twice, on the way to Hamburg and then back to Tating, I am passing the ‘Ausfahrt’ to the little village of Wacken. In case you are not a fan of heavy metal ‘music’: it’s the place where, every year over the first weekend in August, the band of the “Freiwillige Feuerwehr”, the village’s voluntary fire fighters, opens up the world’s biggest and best heavy metal music festival with close to 80,000 guests. I have a friend and colleague who is a fan of “Rammstein”, regular guests in Wacken. Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of them either – but it turns out they are great fun. There is even one particular song that is really good for learning German. More on that later.

Christmas Trees going up – Schön-Klinik

Today, one of Pádraig’s good friends arrived for a visit, he’ll be staying in Hamburg for a few days. It is really great for Pádraig to continue to hear the voices and see the faces of his old friends from home – that is if he can see the faces, given the fancy face masks we are still made to wear when entering the room. Their presence and support is invaluable… A colleague today told me the story of someone who had been in a coma for 9 months. When he woke up, he told everybody that while he had not been able to see or hear the people around him, he could feel their presence and, more surprisingly, their energy. Awake, he could still identify nurses he could now see and hear by sensing their energy – positive or negative or indifferent. So, having positive energy around must be a great boost for Pádraig. Thinking about the centurion again, maybe positive energy even travels and can be felt remotely!

When I came into Pádraig’s room today, I had a flashback from Beaumont where we, at times, picked up ‘stuff’ from the bed or even the floor that had been ‘attached’ to Pádraig but had fallen off for some reason. Today, it was the air tube that blows oxygen across the tracheostomy that had gone ‘missing’. Rather than attaching it myself, I called a doctor who said that it had not fallen, but taken off – and that he was doing fine without it so far.

This was the first time in more than five months that Pádraig was off the oxygen and absolutely and completely breathing by himself without any support or additional oxygen, for hours. (Remember ‘optimism’, ‘remote’ healing, and all that stuff?)

In the meantime, I set up a calendar for friends visiting Pádraig and shared it with everyone who wants to check it out. I thought that people could also put in the dates of their visit themselves, but that does not seem to work (yet?). So in the meantime, if you send the dates of your visit to myself or to Pat, I’ll put the dates in here:
https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ejbikhh20hgf5i87d88fenj9ns%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Europe/Dublin

Today’s German Music Tip
Rammstein, Ich will (released in Germany on 10 September 2001, not released in the US, as planned, on 11 September 2001. The lyrics are great for learning German:). Rammstein are regulars in Wacken, as are Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, and Scorpions (probably one of the best German music outfits, that is if you are into heavy metal:) (Check out the song starting at 1:02 if you are not a heavy metal fan).
What’s hot
Breathing
What’s cold
Breathing support
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Waaackeeen!!!

Voltaire once said that “Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable”, and famous Irishman Oscar Wilde believed that “the basis of optimism is sheer terror”. Science doesn’t agree: a huge study conducted by Hilary Tindle of the University of Pittsburgh showed that optimists are living healthier and longer. The psychologist Ralf Scharzer found that patients with an optimistic outlook recovered better from operations, were more content, and returned to work faster. Even an artificially generated positive outlook resulted in more positive outcomes found Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (All references from the German magazine Der Spiegel.)

While I like Humanities, and Voltaire and Wilde, this time I am going to side with Science. Everything will work out and be just fine. Why? Because there is such an amount of positive energy encouraging Pádraig to overcome his injuries that their effect just will have to fade away.

Today, we had a meeting with the senior neurologist looking after Pádraig. (She once spent 6 months driving through Kerry in a VW Bus bringing medical services to the people of Kerry.) Her main message was that we have time and that she has seen several positive signs in Pádraig that are really promising. Progress is slow, but steady. – Pádraig now seems to have settled. Breathing, temperature, heart, oxygen levels, and blood pressure are all good. For the second consecutive day, he has been off the ventilator for more than 12 hours. He is not getting antibiotics and seems to have less phlegm.

I brought in the collages of pictures assembled by Pádraig’s friends at their first gathering in his support at the Conradh, together with an Irish poster ‘made in Hyannis’, and a wonderful magic quilt on loan from a friend. Finally, the quite sterile looking room (even without us coming in with face masks and full-length aprons) got a bit of a personal touch. To my surprise, the German guardians of hygiene, the mother of  all HIQAs, allowed and, in fact, encouraged me to put up these posters with his pictures  – rather than seeing in them a microbiologist’s nightmare come true (we had to take these posters down in Ireland before the HIQA visits as they were seen as ‘unhygienic’ – they aren’t covered in plastic and cannot be washed.).

Today was a good day, a day for optimism, strength, faith, and a positive outlook.

Today’s German Music Tip
Bushido, Alles wird gut (2010) [22m people have seen this video on youtube, and someone even translated the lyrics into English underneath. You will find the German lyrics here. I don’t quite like rap usually, but this one isn’t that bad at all.]
What’s hot
Optimism
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
“…und wenn sie meinen du stehst nie wieder auf, dann lass sie reden junge
zeig ihnen das ist dein traum, du wirst ihn leben.” (Bushido)

HE is on its way, coming. It’s the first day of the New Year in the calendar of our Church. It’s a time of hope. The plane back to Hamburg is full of people going to see the famous German Christmas Markets. Some are clearly going home already for their Christmas Holidays, full of joy. For those arriving at Dublin airport, it is, as always around this time of the year, in festive mood, with Christmas trees, lights, and never ending loops of Christmas songs. Maria brought me to the airport. Will I be back before Christmas…? In Hamburg, I will see Toni at the airport when I’ll get off the plane and she’ll get on the plane back to Dublin; Pat will stay until Tuesday and then resume her weekly commute; one of Pádraig’s good friends will arrive the same day and stay for the best part of the week. It’s complicated.

We were told by the consultants in Dublin that the first six months after Pádraig’s accident would give us an indication of how his recovery was going to be in the long run. We were told that his youth is on his side. Young people can do amazing things, there are no limits. But, there was the long haul from Hyannis to Dublin, the operation in Dublin putting back the bone flap, the pneumonia and antibiotics, and finally the trip to Germany. We will continue working for and hoping for the best possible outcome.

Today, Pádraig has been off the ventilator since 8am. He has been doing very well, and was still off the ventilator when we left tonight at around 7:30pm. His breathing was supported by oxygen, but at very low levels (just 2l). He had a visitor over today, one of his good friends from the Conradh in Dublin, and there are more friends on the way for this week and the coming weeks leading up to Christmas.

We used to invite old friends to our house on the first Sundays of Advent, for waffles, hot cherries, cream, and Glühwein beside the fire and a room lit with candle light, for the annual catch up on how our kids and we ourselves were doing. 30-years were passing by. We had an ‘Adventskranz’, a reed with four candles. No waffles this year for Advent. No turkey and ham for Christmas this year, no aunts and uncles, no in-laws for Christmas Dinner. Hamburg is too far away.

Today’s German Music Tip
Adventslieder
What’s hot
Hope
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Adventszeit

There is the obvious meaning of the word. It’s when you sleep under bridges or take shelter in the entrance of a department store or supermarket. If you have to do this you are in trouble. You don’t have any money for decent accommodation, and you don’t have friends who would take you in for the night. Your home is where you feel secure, protected; where you know the people, and the people know you.

Over the past months, any doubt that Dublin and Ireland had become my home had been swept away. There was a level of support and solidarity from so many people, it was truly amazing. i came back from Germany on Thursday for a few days and, for some reason, got a very profound feeling of being homeless. I have been uprooted, my live thrown up into the air, and there it is . Of course, I am not really homeless. I have a roof over my head. But I am no longer moving within well established and understood boundaries. I had no choice.

Today was an ordinary day for Pádraig. Nothing strange happened. It was one of these days that little more than five months ago would have filled us with horror. Not anymore. The unthinkable has become a recurring, regular part of our lives. We are not speechless anymore, but ask questions, make suggestions, and manage the situation as good as we can.

I never understood people who spent all their money on buying a house. I always wanted to buy a boat. A house ties you down, a boat keeps you moving. Life eventually made me (us) buy a house, the boat remained my dream. What I really need today though is neither a house nor a boat but Captain Kirk’s transporter operated by Scotty, to ‘beam me up’.

Today’s German Music Tip
Hans Albers, Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins (1943) (From the movie: Große Freiheit Nr. 7; there is a version of the movie, including the song, with English subtitles on youtube; the song starts at 4:49)
What’s hot
The beer-drinking horse in ‘Die große Freiheit Nr. 7’
What’s cold
Being uprooted.
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Hack’ Dich unter… wir wollen zusammen… mal bummeln gehn.

Today we learnt that even in Germany, there are, besides the excellent nurses, also unexperienced nurses. In most professions, there are different levels of professionalism. Healthcare is not different. Today, ‘Herr Schäler’ was not looked after as he has become accustomed to – he was not taken off the ventilator for long enough, they didn’t sit him up in the chair-bed, and his oxygen saturation went down to around 90 – which would not be so bad with an elderly person, in his case it is far too low.

Good thing is: there are always doctors on the ward who can intervene. Pat asked one to check Pádraig out to see whether he needed suctioning; he did, and he also needed to be turned to loosen the phlegm on the other side of his lungs. The doctor also explained to the nurse what to look out for, stressing that the level of oxygen saturation for someone like Pádraig, needed to be close to 100% – especially if he is on a ventilator.

While I was driving on the Irish Autobahn, I heard on the radio that moneys collected

Wo soll das alles enden?

for charities funded by the HSE was used to break accepted salaries agreements. The National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dun Laoghaire offered a ‘top-up’ to  the salary of consultants, already earning way above 100k, and in some cases more than 200 k. The National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dun Laoghaire, is one of the hospitals mentioned in the report where top-ups have been provided to some staff. In the case of the Central Remedial Clinic (CRC), top-ups were given, against existing guidelines and regulations, involving charitable organizations. – Where will it all end?

Today’s German Music Tip
Kraftwerk, Autobahn (1974) (There are different versions of this song on the web, this one shows the German text with its translation into English. It’s the 3:27 single version of the original 22 minute title track of the band’s fourth album.)
What’s hot
Autobahn
What’s cold
Using charitable funds to top up consultants’ salaries
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Skandalös (disgraceful)
Wo soll das alles enden? (Where will all this lead to?)

Going home in the evening on dark roads is a long and drawn out journey.

The experts were discussing on RTÉ who, in their opinion, was the best singer and what the quality was that made them the best. Most of the experts agreed that it was ‘authenticity’ that mattered most. They said, you really need to feel that the music is at one with the person who performs it. But then, there was this one critic who said that this was absolutely and completely wrong: one of the best singers, musicians, and performers of the world, David Bowie, was at his very best when he was not himself at all, but slipped into the persona of Major Tom, völlig losgelöst von der Erde.

Today, I decided to learn about Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, where Pádraig spent almost four months up to 11 November. The information I found differs slightly. The ‘About’ page on Beaumont’s own website (www.beaumont.ie) says it employs approximately 3,000 staff and has 820 beds. The HSE’s site (http://www.hse.ie/eng/services/list/5/nccp/about/Beaumont_Hospital.html) says it employs approximately 3,500 staff, catering for a local community of 250,000 (HSE) versus 290,000 (Beaumont), in addition for it being the “designated Centre of Excellence in Cancer Services and … the Regional Treatment Centre for Ear, Nose and Throat, and Gastroenterology. (It also is) the National Referral Centre for Neurosurgery and Neurology, Renal Transplantation and Cochlear Implantation.” Compare this with the Schön-Klinik in Hamburg: they employ 1,500 staff, covering 700 beds. In terms of patient/bed to staff ratio, Beaumont employs almost twice the number of people than the Schön-Klinik.

It is hard to understand how this is possible – because one of the first things you’d notice about the ward where Pádraig is, is the (generally) much more relaxed way staff works and deals with their patients. The clinic has a long history, and Alfons Maria Jacob described here for the first time in 1920 the Creutzfeldt-Jacob decease. Beaumont is much younger. Again according to Wikipedia, it was planned and commissioned from 1978 to 1984 and represented an investment of IR£50 million. It opened on November 29, 1987 following the closure of two smaller and older Dublin hospitals: The Charitable Infirmary, better known as Jervis Street Hospital and St. Lawrence’s Hospital (known as The Richmond).^[2

Pádraig sat out in his ‘chair’ for many hours today. You can see how that makes him tired. His heart rate goes up, as does the frequency of his breathing. They had washed his hair again today, not sure how they are doing it, but they do it! Again, he has been reacting to our voices and touches. Overall, sitting up is really good for him: it keeps the blood pressure going, helps him clearing his lungs, etc. Today, two of his Irish friends had to go back home today. They were great company for Pádraig, and it was brilliant that they could make it. They were the first of quite a respectable number of his friends coming over for a visit, making sure that the connections are kept strong and kicking.

David Bowie’s and Peter Schilling’s Major Toms both decided to go floating into the outer space. They were the creation of a time when everything was possible – even space exploration.

“Here am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the Moon
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do.”

Major Tom was happy: life was amazing and full of wonders. Bowie showed us that there is a bit of Major Tom in all of us.

Today’s German Music Tip
Peter Schilling, Major Tom (1983) (This is a recording from the German version of Top of the Pops, called Hitparade. Watch the head move, and just one blink from Peter during the whole song!)
What’s hot
No driving tonight.
What’s cold
Tonight’s news about the CRC top ups.
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Völlig losgelöst von der Erde