(Ein wichtiger Hinweis: Ich bin medizinischer Laie. Ich habe nur lange mit meiner Krankheit gelebt. Ich kann alles medizinische hier falsch verstanden oder falsch wiedergegeben haben. Jede in diesem Text wiedergegebene Information ist potentiell aus dem Zusammenhang gerissen, falsch, unvollständig. Hört auf Euren Arzt! Fehler sind meine Fehler, nicht die meiner Ärzte.Meine Erfahrungen sind anekdotisch. Eure Erfahrungen können anders sein.)
Lessons
I have talked a lot about myself. If you have really read this far, I am grateful to you.
People say that there are “learning opportunities” in life. But actually, from my perspective, that isn’t quite fitting, because it suggests that there are times in which you learn nothing. That isn’t true. I can’t remember a single day in my life on which I learned nothing. They may only be small things. But you learn about yourself, about other people, about the world, about yourself in interplay with the world. Curiosity is perhaps not the search for the new at all, but rather the will to perceive what the world offers you to learn. I have not yet experienced a single day in my life on which the world did not offer me something to learn. Sometimes they are big things, like a new skill, sometimes they are small things like the realisation of how you react to a situation. Sometimes they are large meals that you take from the world’s knowledge, like at school, sometimes only small bites in everyday life, once you are grown up. I believe it stays that way until the last conscious moment of our lives. I hope so.
Of course the question then arises of what I have learned from my illness over the last seven years. What I learned on the path of the last three months. What are the lessons I have drawn? Many lessons are already contained in the text so far. Sometimes expressed directly, others couched within the text. So what would my big lessons be, the ones I have drawn from the last seven years?
Not allowing yourself to over-exploit your own body, of course. Living healthily, above all keeping your blood pressure under control. Blood pressure is the silent killer. What this saying doesn’t tell you is that high blood pressure, if it doesn’t kill you, can have very exhausting consequences. For instance, an operation like this one.
But otherwise too: perhaps less stress, more health. With some people in the follow-up rehab I did wonder what had landed them in this place. They seemed so out of place. They seemed too young to me for life to have already brought them into hospital. As if a congenital problem had led them into the operation. A heart attack all the same. A valve that needed replacing all the same.
I have the feeling that this “I-just-have-to-quickly-save-the-world” attitude, if you otherwise don’t look after yourself, can also very quickly end up in Bad Bevensen or a comparable institution. If it doesn’t end up on the Karkhoff, as this place is called in the dialect of my home region. Mindfulness also means having the realisation that you don’t have to save the world alone. The world cannot be saved alone. That is a team job. In the large as well as in the very small. And through the team you have the chance to recharge your energy too, while others continue the rescue. That you have to look closely at which world you save first. Which world you save as a team. And which world you leave unsaved. It only shocked me how much china I smashed along the way before this mundane and completely obvious realisation finally arrived inside my skull.
There are also far more practical lessons: perhaps at the next check-up ask the doctor to point the ultrasound towards the aorta as well, to see whether everything there is still in order. At least the part that lies in the abdominal cavity. So that you aren’t informed only by the bursting of an aneurysm, three minutes before death. Because you don’t always have the luck of an incidental finding.
If a diagnosis befalls you, inform yourself about it. I am convinced that an informed patient is a good patient. By informing yourself I don’t mean here some questionable information from social networks, where you can’t really verify where this information comes from. But rather informing yourself about your own illness in specialist books. Reading studies. Above all, reading the consent form shortly before the operation. Really reading it. And not just skimming it and signing, because the operation seems unavoidable anyway.
The more you know, the more you gain the feeling that you are not being steered by the illness, but rather controlling your own path with the illness. All the same, don’t watch any operation videos on YouTube. I learned that the hard way. There are also things that you don’t necessarily need to know. And don’t necessarily need to see.
But what I also learned was that you get through something like this too. Before the 29th of September, all of this looked very, very big and very frightening. They were certainly not easy, those three months I went through. But you get through it. I got through it. With all the apprehensions. With all the fears. With all the funk.
People always say children are resilient. To point out how easily they can deal with big changes. But that is only half the story. We all have this resilience within us. All people are resilient. I have seen so much strength in the people around me to keep going, even when everything seems hard. It’s just that the older we get, the more inertia we have in wanting to stick with the old. Even when it isn’t good for us. But if we accept big changes, recognise that things are not the way we had hoped, and see that some things are unsustainable and not good in the long run, then we are just as capable of coping with these challenges.
The End
At the end of this series I would like to make use of a slightly altered text by the German everyday philosopher Thomas D. It is a text that I wrote a long time ago, almost in this form, for a letter that I never sent. Here, however, it seems fitting to me, so that I want to close the account of the last seven years with it.
For since, in our fears, we are all still a child within,
and since those who seem grown-up to us are our greatest heroes,
I describe my world with my worries inside me.
For I am still there, no, I am here nonetheless,
since the ability to recount has remained with me,
and since fate and illness are a component of all our lives,
the wish to share oneself was awakened, and what slept in my memory
here guided the pen and wrote this long letter.
Yes, I know … I will open the door for myself and close it behind me again.
Thank you!
In this text I would like to thank a multitude of people. The order does not represent any ranking. My gratitude towards all these people is great. I thank …
- my parents, my siblings, as well as the spouses and partners of my siblings. In the time before and afterwards you had to get through quite a lot with me. You are simply wonderful.
- the doctors, the cardiac technicians, the nurses, as well as all the other staff of the Albertinen Hospital in Hamburg, in particular the surgical team around Prof. Dr. Hanke, who operated on me. I owe it to everyone there that everything went so well.
- the team of the rehab clinic in Bad Bevensen.
- my cardiologist, for being a team in dealing with my illness for over seven years.
- my GP, for sometimes simply confronting me with uncomfortable truths.
- my manager, who showed great understanding for my situation.
- my colleagues, who took over my work during the long period of incapacity for work after the operation.
- all those people who accompanied me on the path through the last seven years. Some the whole stretch, some only a short way. Even if I have lost contact with some – partly not on good terms – I am grateful to them for their company and always will be. I have forgotten neither them nor their company.
- you, who have read this text to the very end.
