Illness turned my life around

LL: DE/UK: Illness turned my life around

It was the 26th of April 1976, the day after my friends C. and H. got married. I woke up with excruciating pain in my stomach. I could hardly walk or stand. No way was I able to go to work that day. I had to go to the doctor to get this sorted. My GP did not have a clue what was causing me so much pain and referred me to a specialist. This was the start of a week-long odyssey. I was sent from specialist to specialist, from the gastroenterologist to the nephrologist and the urologist, who, looking at my hard and swollen belly, sent me to the gynaecologist thinking that I was pregnant. (I knew I wasn’t, but they did not believe me). Nobody had any idea what was wrong with me.

Alone with painkillers

I was given lots of painkillers and sent home for the weekend. A kind taxi driver took pity on me and helped me up the stairs to my apartment. All I wanted was to sleep and for the terrible pain to go away. If I had to die, that was alright with me as long as the pain went away.

From then onwards, I don’t remember much. My mother later said she got very worried as I had told her over the phone that I had not been to the toilet for a week and could not pass water. I had started to vomit dark brown stuff. Luckily, my dear friend and neighbour, A., decided to check on me when he came home from a Saturday night out with his friends. He found me unconscious and called an ambulance. The emergency doctor did not know what was wrong with me either but at least she recognised it was an emergency and rushed me to the hospital.

I was not worried but rather relieved that somebody took the initiative and did something.

The kind doctors in the hospital in Munich explained to me that the X-ray did not reveal much and they needed to open my tummy to see what was going on. Just as I was about to be wheeled into the operating theatre, a young lad was rushed into the theatre in front of me, bleeding heavily. The nurses who were waiting with me told me he had a motorbike accident and his legs were badly injured. Most possibly, they had to amputate both his legs. How horrible! I felt so sorry for him. Two hours later, it was my turn, and I was wheeled in for surgery at 4 am.

Solving the riddle

When I woke up, everything was white around me, and I heard bells ringing. For a moment I wondered whether I was in heaven, but then I heard loud screaming next to me. It was the young lad in the next cubicle who had also woken up and had just noticed that his legs were missing. I felt for him.

A doctor popped his head into my cubicle and told me that I was very lucky because if they had not operated on me in the night, I would not have survived until the morning. He explained that I had a tumour on my intestines that had caused peritonitis and intestinal perforation. The operation took six hours, because they needed to remove part of my intestines and clean my guts. They did not fit a colostomy pouch (Ileostomy) as the consultant, who was brought in during the night to oversee my operation, thought it unimaginable for a young woman of my age to have an external bowel bag. Thank you, Doctor! Much appreciated!

I was fascinated to hear all that but it took me a while to fully grasp the enormity of it. Over the next few days, I was visited and examined by several more doctors and professors. It seems that nobody had ever seen such a disease pattern in a young person like me, who was only 22 years old. This was commonly known as an old person's disease, which explained why none of my doctors had recognised it.

Recovery requires a deeper look

It took me a while to recover, not only physically but also psychologically. At first, I refused to eat as I was anxious that by eating the pain and illness would start all over again. I was bribed into eating by the wonderful caring intensive care nurses. They promised to let me have a small glass of Bavarian beer once my bowels were working again. As I was thirsty and fed up with drinking lukewarm water, I accepted their offer.

It took me a while to realise that I did not want to get better and leave the hospital, as I did not want to go back to my work as a secretary in an office. I was dead bored and deeply unhappy with my job. It finally occurred to me that I had just jumped off death’s shovel and had been given a second chance at life and that I needed to do something useful with this new life.

But – I had no idea what to do or what I wanted from life. There was no serious boyfriend in my life, and I was not interested (yet) in setting up a family and having children.

How it all began

I left school when I was 15 after finishing my O-levels. Like many of my friends from primary school, I had attended a Realschule (medium-level education) for girls, run by Catholic Nuns, leading to O-levels after four years. The school’s goal was to equip us girls with a good all-around general knowledge base and prepare us to run a household and support our future husbands. We learnt everything from cooking to needlework; even in physics, we studied how a thermos flask or a cooking plate worked. We also learnt book-keeping, stenography and typing. These skills were considered useful to earn money before marriage, or for additional family income or as a pastime once the children were grown up.

Only a few of us 15- and 16-years olds knew what we wanted to do afterwards. A few wanted to work with children or look after ill people. Those few whose fathers had a business had their work laid out by joining the family business. But the vast majority of the rest of us, like me, had no clue what to do. A friendly but useless woman from the job centre, invited by our school to advise us, did not inspire us with outstanding options. She suggested that considering the skills we had learnt in this school, we should work as administrators in an office, putting into practice our stenography and typing skills. The rare times I had visited my father in his office, where he worked as book-keeper, I was impressed by all the office utensils on his desk. Besides the punch hole makers, staplers and files, I found it particularly fascinating having use of a telephone, something we did not have at home at that time. Based on these indicators, somehow, the decision was made that I should go and work as a secretary in an office. Soon afterwards, I joined eight girls from my school, and together we started to work in a local bank.

Once the reality of everyday life in the office became apparent, I rapidly became bored with the daily routine. I was disillusioned and thought there must be more to life than typing up and filing what other people gave me to type, filling in forms and filing them away. I began to dream that I needed to move to a bigger town in order to have a more interesting and meaningful life. After three years, I turned my dream into reality and moved to Munich and worked as a secretary in a property management office. Something still wasn’t right, and after a further three years, my body revolted, and I had become ill. And it was then that I knew instinctively that I needed a radical new beginning.

How it all started

I still had no idea what I wanted from life or what my purpose in life was. Unimpressed with previous advice from job centres I decided consulting someone with an expertise in testing intellectual and professional abilities would be the way forward.

Once out of the hospital, I contacted a psychiatric professor specialising in intelligence testing, whose phone number I had found in the yellow pages. I hoped that he could shed some light on what my talents and qualities were in order to help me decide upon a new career path. Perhaps I even had it in me to study at a university. Who knows?

The results of the multiple tests revealed that I was blessed with mediocre intelligence and had a talent for looking after children. A potential career as a childminder working in a Kindergarten was the professor’s recommendation. His fatherly advice was: “Don’t dream of going to a university because studying is not within your intellectual capabilities.” What? Come again? I already knew that I was not a genius or an intellectual highflyer, but his professional pearls of wisdom shocked me quite a bit. At least I had expected a range of career options from which to choose, based on the science of the psychological tests rather than a judgement purely based on his male values and views of what a young girl like me should do with her life.

Believe in yourself!

Exasperated, I phoned my brother, who was studying Psychology in Berlin, for advice. His response was: “I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t go to University. I simply thought that you were not interested in studying.”

From then on, everything fell into place. A friend told me about an interesting school project in Berlin for mature students to gain their A-levels. This alternative school was special in the sense that students and teachers ran the school together. Students were respected as equals, and students and teachers decided together as to what subjects to learn during the next term. That was just the right thing for me, and I decided to give it a go.

However, there was just a little barrier to overcome: My father was dead against my idea of leaving my job and going back to school. He was brought up in the traditional way in that he did not believe this was what girls should do. He wanted the best for me, and in his view, it was getting a husband to look after me and have children, which would give me purpose in life. Unfortunately, this was not what I wanted. He was not willing to contribute to my school fees and my new life as a student. Added to this, it dawned on me that by then, I was used to having my own income and being independent. Not having a regular monthly salary was a frightening concept.

However, I calculated and made enquiries. I learned as a mature student I was entitled to a student loan, independent from my parents’ income, and with a bit of work besides my studies, I reckoned I should be able to pay the school fees, the rent and my cost of living. This strategy and my siblings’ mediation on my behalf persuaded my father to let me do what I wanted to do. Moreover, as a gesture of goodwill, he went with me to purchase an electric typewriter that would help me to get work, for example, typing dissertations for other people (needless to say, I had to pay for the typewriter myself).

Stepping into a new life

Finally, equipped with my new electric typewriter, I moved to Berlin and never looked back. I was enthusiastic about the school, about Berlin and about my new life. There was so much to do and so much to learn. I had so much catching up to do, and there were not enough hours in a day. I felt free to do anything, and, more importantly, I had the energy. I got involved in the school’s administration, became an activist in the feminist, environmental and peace movements and got involved in third-world activities. By the way, the typing skills I was taught and my little typewriter proved very useful. For many years both provided me with valid income not only for my student life in Berlin but also to fund my travels, project work and studies in various Latin American countries.

The lived experience of alternative education for adults, together with my health scare, gave me inspiration. They were vital influences and education and health were, to some extent, a constant throughout my professional career. I went to University to study adult education, and I became involved in alternative education projects (education for peace, environment, women’s equality etc). I worked on literacy campaigns and with health education projects in Nicaragua. Back in Berlin, I moved into the area of health education (women’s health and wider health promotion) and public health. My Master's dissertation in London was on the topic of improving health service provision for migrants in Germany. My PhD was on developing and testing educational training to enhance cultural competence in staff in health and social services who work with clients from different cultural and social backgrounds. I also conducted research analysing health service provision for people with HIV, drug and alcohol or mental health problems and for people who had experienced domestic violence. I identified gaps and made recommendations on how to improve health systems. After years of training nurses and social workers at a London University, I set up a Recovery College for people who had suffered from drug and alcohol addiction and mental health problems, and by doing so, help them to reintegrate back into society and to get a job.

Feedback to the Expert

My message to the Professor in Munich: I proved you wrong. There was more in me than working as a nursery teacher in a Kindergarten – not that there is anything wrong with being a nursery teacher, but it simply wasn’t for me. I wanted something else. I wanted to find my own purpose in life. I wanted to develop my own dreams and follow them. I wanted to be free to choose my own goals, and through my work, I wanted to help other people to reach their potential. I achieved all this, despite or perhaps because of some stumbling blocks like illness, incorrect analysis and stereotypical male views of women. (LL)

I wanted to follow my dreams and I won!