You wouldn’t believe how confused I feel at times. For all sorts of different reasons.

Imagine. For more than a year spending the best part of the day under a blue-ish apron, behind a large face mask that just about allows you to breathe, and putting on semi-sterile gloves on several times a day. Almost all of the time in one single room with one or two, on occasions some more, other people. Not allowed to go for a walk, except down this ginormous corridor towards the tiny roof garden with its thirteen steps in each direction. Pushing Pádraig in his wheelchair up and down, changing the direction of the ‘turn’ at the end of the thirteen steps so that neither him nor yourself gets dizzy from turning and turning and turning around in the same direction.

Imagine. Being in Hamburg. Working with people around the world. Listening to Irish news. Having to think about which language to talk in to people.

Imagine. Making choices so hard, they make you cry. When you ask yourself: what am I doing? Why am I not doing only and absolutely definitely nothing else than the important ‘stuff’ and in a moment getting all mixed about about what is important.

561 was the headline figure on tonight’s Irish news. It’s the record number of people on trolleys today, a day that nurses threaten to go on strike because hospitals have become so unsafe that 70 year olds spent nights on trolleys with some of the patients just falling off their trolleys.

Turns out that Dr Tony O’Connell, director of acute hospitals with direct responsibility for trolley waits, has resigned his post after less than nine months and is planning to return to his native Australia, apparently because his wife got a good job there. Hhhmmm.

561 in a country with a population the size of a large city in the developed world.

If that wasn’t bad enough. The next piece of news was the Minister of Finance saying that he is planning to lower tax.

I don’t get it. Something somewhere here is fundamentally wrong.

Pádraig’s discharge from the Schön-Klinik is taking shape. There will be a number of meetings this week to plan the details.

Wednesday, of course, will be the day of his trip to the UKE’s outpatient’s department to assess his tracheostomy or better: to assess the chances of success of a removal of his tracheostomy. In the meantime, we keep practicing. In the mean time, Pádraig is making huge efforts to convert each ‘first’, each ‘personal best’ or ‘PB’, from the exceptional to the every-day achievement.

We’re playing the Dreamboat to him. We’re travelling down this stream together with the other Dreamboaters. We’ll get there. This boat will swim!