The English word of the year 2013, if you believe the Oxford English Dictionary, is “Selfie”. The News were full of reports about a ‘selfie with Obama and a flirty Dane‘ at Nelson Mandela’s funeral, pointing out the lack of respect and self-centeredness of some of the world’s most powerful and famous politicians.

Ich hab’ ein zärtliches Gefühl
für jeden Nichtsnutz, jeden Kerl
der frei herumzieht ohne Ziel
der niemands Knechts ist, niemands Herr

The Germans are much more serious and solemn about their words of the year. Since 1971, the “Gesellschaft für Deutsche Sprache” has declared the ‘German word of the Year’. There were some gems, like ‘Konspirative Wohnung’ (1978), ‘Rasterfahndung’ (1980), ‘Heißer Herbst’ (1983), ‘Besserwessi’ (1991), or ‘Wutbürger’ (2010). Today, on Friday 13th, they declared the German word of the year 2013: ‘GroKo’. – I’ll let you figure out what that means.

Ich hab’ ein zärtliches Gefühl
für den, der seinen Mund auftut
der Gesten gegenüber kühl
und brüllt, wenn’s ihm danach zumut’

Today’s Friday 13th was our lucky day. Pádraig got a visit from a good Irish friend, Maria is back in town, and Pádraig seemed to be quite awake and aware during the day. The best thing we heard today was that yesterday’s news, that his lungs had collapsed for a third time, turned out to be what the German’s call an ‘Ente’ – it had not happened  at a all, but the news had spread anyhow. At the end it turned out to have been just a mix-up.

Ich hab’ ein zärtliches Gefühl
für jede Frau, für jeden Mann
für jeden Menschen, wenn er nur
vollkommen wehrlos lieben kann

I assume everybody followed the news about another few big mixups at Nelson Mandela’s funeral: First Enda bids farewell to ‘Nadiba‘, then Thamsanqa Jantjie turns out to be the fake of the year at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. Friday 13th, 2013, will be a day we’ll remember.

Today’s German Music Tip
Hermann van Veen, Ich habe ein zärtliches Gefühl (1978).
What’s hot
Getting ready for getting the keys of our Hamburg base on Monday
What’s cold
Getting mixed up about 3rd pneumothorax that never happened
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
GroKo

Twitter: @forPadraig
#caringforPadraig
web: http://www.caringforPadraig.org

Today, I officially signed up to become a ‘Genosse’ (‘comrade’ for those non-German speakers and ignoramus about the history of class struggle). For some reason, they didn’t want Pat. Maybe they know something about her I don’t? Anyway, the funny thing was that as a pre-requisite to join the movement, I had to sign up for 52 membership shares, 52 being the number of square metros (here, auto-correct assumed me to be Cuban?) of our new home away from home, just a 10-minute walk or so away from the clínica. Everything has its price.

Genossen: our new house!

Thinking about my other fellow-Genossen, I looked up the German version of a famous song starting with “Wacht auf…”, literally: ‘wake up’. I played it for Pádraig to see whether he would catch on to the lyrics. But he was very relaxed today, not in fighting spirit and not very awake. All in all, there hasn’t been much of a change since yesterday, with the exception of a lot of the ‘markers’ we are watching all the time: his oxygen saturation was close to 100% (after being close to 90 yesterday), his heart rate was down, and so was his temperature. All good. – We asked the nurse whether anything noteworthy had happened while we had been away. No, she said, same as yesterday. On our way out we asked a doctor, whether all was ok. She called us into her office and told us that when they had stopped the ‘vacuum’ to see whether Pádraig’s left lung was going to stay as it should, the lung had collapsed again – a third time in little more than a week. They will try again in a few days time…

My rucksack doubled in size, with the rental agreement and a special arch lever folder for the hundreds of pages about how to properly air your apartment (I had to sign that one), the ‘Hausordnung’ (had to sign that one too), the constitution of the Wohnungsbaugenossenschaft, and all sorts of other really important stuff. The nice lady in the office told me to take it home and to read it ‘in aller Ruhe’. Good job she gave me this folder to file it all away, ‘in aller Ruhe’. I realized that I had forgotten all about what Germany was like.

There are several different version of this traditional song I mentioned earlier on youtube. It’s sometimes also referred to as “Die Internationale”. Most of them hover around the 300 hit mark, just two got above 18,000 hits. Compare that to yesterday’s recommendation, “Lieder”, that already has 6.8 million hits, after just a couple of months. Not sure what it is. What makes a ‘hit’, what makes a ‘miss’.

I am sure, “Wacht auf” will become a hit in 2014. It has got a great opening line and a powerful rhythm. I’ll just keep playing it to Pádraig.

Today’s German Music Tip
Unknown (original lyrics by Eugène Pottier), Die Internationale (“Wacht auf…”) (1871).
What’s hot
Visitors coming tomorrow. Irish. Andrew being interviewed on TnaG.
What’s cold
Long, dark evenings, starting at 3pm.
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Wacht auf!

Twitter: @forPadraig
#caringforPadraig
web: http://www.caringforPadraig.org

I guess most people think of Frank Sinatra when they think of the song “The Best Is Yet to Come”. Well, for those of you who don’t get that excited about auld blue eyes, there is an alternative: The Scorpions, one of Germany’s finest music groups, have a song with that title too. “And the best is yet to come. I know, you know that we’ve only just begun, through the highs and lows. And how can I live without you, you’re such a part of me and you’ve always been the one keeping me forever young – And the best is yet to come.”

While the best IS yet to come, today was pretty good. Having been out house hunting for the early afternoon, I went to see Pádraig a bit later than usual. On my way in, a doctor told me that in the morning, his left lung had collapsed again – and they didn’t quite understand how and why that was happening. As a result, the drainage producing a vacuum to allow his lung to expand again, had not been removed and will stay there for another five days. So, I walked in to Pádraig to tell him about the apartments I had seen. I looked like as if he was asleep. But then, when I called him and started to talk to him, he first opened his right eye (which is closed most of the time ‘normally’) and then also his ‘good’ left eye. When I took his hand and was telling him about my house hunting adventures, he was with me like never before. It was amazing and really emotional. When I told the doctor, he said that he had been quite awake when the Oberärztin had visited earlier in the morning. For the first time, I felt like as if Christmas was getting very near.

Another nice thing happened yesterday that we had been asking for for months: Pádraig  got a visit from a dentist who will get him something like a mouth/teeth guard. And here, we did not even ask for it. Frau Doctor Oberärztin organized it all on her own initiative as she had observed that Pádraig was still grinding his teeth from time to time – and we wouldn’t want him to wake up with bad or damaged teeth!

We have seen people, their needs and their bodies, being neglected because they were not ‘awake’, because they were in a state where, as one doctor once told us, in the past they would have sent them to a  ‘home for the incurables’. In an article in the London Independent, Liz Hunt reported last year that “they may languish for up to six months in the general ward to which they were first admitted.” – Pádraig was there for almost four months, and we have seen a patient kept on an acute ward for more than two years. “As a result”, she writes, “more than 80 per cent of (these) patients are undernourished when they are eventually admitted to a rehabilitation unit. They are usually constipated, suffering muscular contractures, and have been lying looking up at a ceiling. ‘It is not surprising that the brain is not functioning properly under these circumstances. We get the nutrition right, then their bowels and bladders,’ Dr Andrews says.” – Dr Keith Andrews being the director of medical and research services at the Royal Hospital and Home in Putney, London. We may add, that we have come across patients with dropped feet and whose shoulder blades had been dislocated by ‘accident’. While there are 20 beds for mid- to long-term coma patients just in Putney, similar to the number of these beds in the Schön-Klinik, there are 3 (!) in the whole of Ireland, with a waiting time of approximately a year – which, putting it very mildly, at least borders on neglect.

Take my hand, the best is yet to come
Oh can you feel it in the air
It’s in your heart and everywhere
We got to keep that dream alive

Today’s German Music Tip
Aki Bosse, Die schönste Zeit (2013). This is the most up-to-date entry in the ‘German Music Tips’! with some really cool:) one-liners. Check out these, for example:
“Es war 1994 und wir wussten nicht wohin. Also gingen wir in dein Bett.
“Und Berlin war wie New York, ein meilenweit entfernter Ort.”
“Dein erstes Tattoo war dann der Refrain: “It’s better to burn out then to fade away – my my, hey hey”.”
What’s hot
Dentists in ICU and What is yet to come
What’s cold
Pneumothorax
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
“Was wir nicht können
ist irgendwas wiederholen
wir können nicht zurück
und warum sollten wir auch?”
(Aki Bosse, Die schönste Zeit)

Twitter: @forPadraig
#caringforPadraig
web: http://www.caringforPadraig.org

A shadow of myself.

Taa taa ta taaaa tata, tata ta taa ta ta… I couldn’t get rid of this melody. It got stuck in my head and it was replaying, and replaying, and replaying. No way it would ever leave me alone. I turned on the radio, listened to a different kind of music. I tried chewing gum, the movement of my mouth and my teeth molding the gum would clear my head. I opened the window and stuck my head out at 120km/h. But once I settled back into my seat, looking out onto the A23, there it was again, very soft at first and then with all its whistles and bells: Taa taa ta taaaa tata, tata ta taa ta ta…

Where will it all end?

Yesterday, Pat and I went to the beach in St. Peter-Ording, just a few kilometers (or miles:) from here. And there, the Germans showed their real face: Although security had safely cordoned of the foot-bridge leading out towards the beach and the sea, they were climbing across the barrier, tearing it down in the process. Lenin once said about the Germans that if they were to start a revolution on a platform in a train station, they would buy platform-tickets (Bahnsteigkarten) to get there. Well, Lenin – guess what: Germany and the Germans have changed. Next thing will be that they’re going to ignore the little red man in the traffic lights. The end of the world as we know it. Anarchy!

A new nurse today. Turns out she has been in the hospital for less time than us. In a way, it’s re-assuring that not all is perfect in perfect-land. While she is not (yet) anywhere close to Pádraig’s favourite nurse, she is good, caring, and concerned. When she had turned Pádraig, she explained to me that she is putting pressure under his feet so that he doesn’t loose the feeling – think about it: after a long period not putting pressure on your feet, they might completely ‘forget’ what it feels like standing up with pressure on your feet. She also called in the Stationsarzt (like the ‘sister’ on a ward, only that here it’s a doctor) to explain to me that a slight movement around his temple where the bone plate was put in again is nothing to worry about; and that they had switched of the ‘under-pressure’ on the drainage in his lungs: all seemed to be good. Tomorrow, they will take another X-ray just to be sure to be sure, and then they will remove the tube. That will, hopefully, be the end of this little blip on Pádraig’s road to recovery.

There it is again: Taa taa ta taaaa tata, tata ta taa ta ta… Now I remember the song:
“Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end. We’d sing and dance forever and a day. We’d live the life we choose, we’d fight and never lose, for we were young and sure to have our way…” And then the last verse: “Through the door there came familiar laughter. I saw your face and heard you call my name. Oh my friend we’re older but no wiser, for in our hearts the dreams are still the same.” –

Today’s German Music Tip
Klaus Lage, 1000 und 1 Nacht (Zoom!) (1984) – There is also a really good live version of the song on youtube that has unfortunately been cut off at the end.
What’s hot
Getting up after a fall, falling again and getting up again, …
What’s cold
Bahnsteigkarten
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
…und es hat ZOOM gemacht!

Twitter: @forPadraig
#caringforPadraig
web: http://www.caringforPadraig.org

Today is the second of advent and, as it happens, the 33rd anniversary of John Lennon’s death. I know, I won’t ask the ‘where-were-you-when-you-heard-the-news?’ question… most of Pádraig’s friends weren’t even born then. Pat and I were in Spain, studying in Salamanca, laying the foundations of something long lasting without realizing it, having the year of our lives.

When I first heard about the Schön-Klinik , I thought: what a name for a hospital (‘schön’ meaning: nice, beautiful, pretty)! Then, a few days ago, I talk to somebody around the reception area of the hospital who told me a bit about the history and the background of the Schön-Klinik. It’s an incredible story. To cut it short: The Schön-Klinik was founded in 1985, is headquartered in the south of Germany, on the very ‘schön’ Chiemsee, and comprises 16 hospitals across Germany. It employs 8,500 people, treated 88,000 patients in 2012 (in the whole of Ireland: 603,911), and had revenues of 591 million euro in the same year. I kept the most amazing fact to last: It’s named after its owner: Dieter Schön and his family!

Today, when we went to see Pádraig, he seemed to be very tired. We watched the Lat Late Toy Show with him – which didn’t seem to make much of an impression. The doctors were saying that they didn’t quite understand why his breathing and oxygen saturation is not better than it is. He is still on a respirator and should get more than enough oxygen, yet his oxygen saturation is just about ok. The pneumothorax seems to be fixed and his left lung is back were it used to be. They have left the drainage and ‘under-pressure’ going over the weekend and will probably try to reduce the under-pressure over the coming days before taking the drainage out, if all goes according to plan. One of the doctors showed and explained to us a recent CT which, he said, did not show too much damage in the regions where it provided a good image. They are still planning to do an MRT to get a better idea of areas that the CT doesn’t show very well. – When we left tonight, Pádraig had kind of woken up: both of his eyes were open and he seemed to follow our conversation, and to react with squeezing our hands.

Over the coming two weeks, there will be a few friends visiting. It’ll be great for Pádraig to get all the news from home!

Today’s German Music Tip
Herbert Grönemeyer, Bochum (1984/2012) – I’m not from Bochum, but from Dortmund, just beside Bochum, but this could be a song about my home town (was it not for the VFL Bochum:)
What’s hot
Bell X1, Kodaline, The Coronas sending their best wishes to Pádraig
What’s cold
rain, rain, rain on the motorway
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Witzwort, Quickborn, Welt – All names of villages we pass every day.

Twitter: @forPadraig
#caringforPadraig
web: http://www.caringforPadraig.org

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!!!