Dhe walker makes things easier, no question about it. But the way is still endless, even with the walker. From the parking lot through the main entrance, take the elevator down one floor, then across the brown plastic floor reflecting the neon light from the ceiling. A sunny day in early May, in treatment room -1/33250, Stefanie von Wietersheim puts down the walker and falls into a chair. The doctor wants to know how she is doing today. The patient says: “It is totally dependent on the day. I practice walking.” She is still tied to the house, the trips to Marburg are exhausting and only possible if her husband comes along and helps when he pushes her and fetches the elevator. “If the strain becomes too great, it translates into pain,” she says. The blow came suddenly, a few months ago. Shortly after the third vaccination against Coronavirus. How does that feel? Stefanie von Wietersheim says: “All of a sudden life was gone.”
It wasn’t long ago that she was perfectly healthy. For her work, the author regularly traveled, attended events, worked for hours on the computer. And trained privately for a half marathon that the 51-year-old wanted to run. But nothing came of it. The collapse came shortly after the booster vaccination in December. Heart palpitations, pain attacks, physical weakness. And it got worse. “After a week I could not walk, read, listen to music and could hardly speak. Just lie down,” she says. In the treatment room Marburg she tells her doctor about how she once tried to get behind the wheel of her car and couldn’t even start the engine because of the pain.
She talks about the day when she tried to go for a little walk and suddenly couldn’t go back in the meadow behind the house because of pain and exhaustion. About the fact that she often feels an unpleasant tingling in her legs. And she reports how the powerful drug alleviates her suffering a little. Until mid-May, von Wietersheim regularly took oxycodone for the pain, an opioid that is even stronger than morphine. A pain therapist prescribed it to her because she couldn’t stand it any longer. The doctor wants to know how she is doing with it. “It makes you a bit balla balla,” says the patient.
Three doctors, hundreds of appointment requests
In the Marburg University Clinic, a small team of three doctors has specialized in patients like her, who suffer from the long-term effects of Corona vaccination Suffer. The special department emerged from the larger interdisciplinary post-Covid outpatient clinic, whose doctors take care of those who suffer from the long-term effects of an infection that has gone through. The symptoms are similar, but while post-Covid is slowly being accepted as a clinical picture, post-vac patients are still in the early stages. When they walk through the hospital doors for the first time, many have had a veritable medical marathon, general practitioners, internists, neurologists, pain therapists. And not infrequently psychiatrists too, because doctors repeatedly suspect a mental illness behind the symptoms.