Advance

Angie's father Sepp continues to be our focus of attention. As the doctors in intensive care like to have one contact person to give the daily update to, her half-brother, who lives in Sepp's house and has his own business close by, has the task of attending mid-morning to receive this. He then phones Angie and she coordinates with her two sisters who is going to visit and when. Trying to balance between making him know he isn't alone and not getting him worked up over his situation.

Sepp who is about to celebrate his 84th birthday was born and raised in very different times, some of which I have written about in the past. Not only does he always want to be in charge when it's his show, ensuring everyone is happy and looked after. He's never needed anyone's help (at least in his view). Sitting/lying in a bed attached to a dozen tubes, unable to scratch his nose let alone drink, eat or talk in more than a syllable at a time before nodding away, drives him mad. And it's very visible when one watches the large monitor above his head with all the vital signs displayed.

We drove up to Fürstenfeldbruck, the capital town of the county of the same name that borders on the west of Munich and acts nowadays as a dormitory town for many, although it does also have the European HQ for at least two large US semiconductor companies.

Angie is superb in such situations and managed to do a lot that seemed to make him more comfortable even if he does sometimes try to resist. I could do little more than hold his hand and chat some nonsense with him partly in English as he is extraordinarily fit in the language (including Shakespeare or Shack-es-Pierre, as he jokingly says in German English).

He had just received a good dose of painkillers and was thus pretty drowsy and not as responsive as yesterday but when grandson Tobi (who we had picked up yesterday from the airport) arrived, Sepp reacted very strongly desperate to show that he was fine and in charge as every man should be. I mentioned yesterday that Sepp had been given lemonade - I was wrong, the male nurse Martin had said he could have it but what nobody realised was that we had to buy/bring it. When Tobi was about to leave, I asked Tobi if he would go down to the hospital shop and buy a bottle of "Spezi" a Coca-Cola and orange lemonade mix which I think is unique to this part of the world and which Sepp has been known to drink. Tobi kindly did and Martin mixed it in a cup with some powder which gels it and thus makes it easier to dispense and swallow as it melts back to liquid form in the mouth. When Sepp had his first sip he muttered "Klasse" - wonderful - the only full word he managed while we were there.

And that seemed to make him happy, he became very calm and perhaps helped to get some reactions which meant we needed to leave the room. And so the three of us left for the day, knowing that the next visitors were due within an hour.

As Martin had said, the hours in intensive care are often up and down and the situation at any given moment is not necessarily a good indicator of progress. The opinion is he is steady and still going through the critical stage where his own body needs to start taking over from the support given by medicines. Critical times and the whole family is determined to give him as much moral support to get up the hill ahead.

Some of the older readers may have some memory of having heard of Fürstenfeldbruck - it has an airbase which was where the hostage Israeli athletes were killed after the terrorist attackon their accommodation in the 1972 Munich Olympic village. The massacre was I guess the first such international terrorist attack and for which nobody was prepared. It sadly culminated in the founding of specialist anti-terrorist units around the world.