MY LIFE IN CORONA DAYS: The doctor Oliver Herrmann was ill himself / In his practice he experiences worrying thin skin.
. How does it change your view of the corona pandemic when you have gone through the disease yourself? Oliver Herrmann, who works as a general practitioner in the Hofweier group practice, is a palliative doctor and hospice doctor who is quite familiar with borderline situations in medical art. How did he experience his own corona disease last late autumn? “A walk is really not such a corona disease,” the 55-year-old judges in retrospect. “My wife Martina and I went through quarantine together at our home. We slept a lot, neighbors put food in front of our door, I regularly measured our blood oxygen saturation and fever, listened to our lungs, and we learned a lot about ours Fears spoken. ” His wife is a pastor and can deal with fears: “So we jointly drove the gruesome images in the media of stacked coffins, desperate doctors and other horror scenarios out of our heads.” This reporting did more harm than good. “But I’ve learned to trust my body and I’m no longer afraid of Corona.” In his practice and incidentally also in road traffic, however, he is now experiencing worrying thin skin in many people: “The fuse is very short!” If things don’t go the way they want, the ladies at the practice reception would have to endure a lot. “We have to de-escalate a lot.” Sometimes a sentence starts with: “I don’t even know you like that, Mr. Anyway, what about you?” And here sometimes “the drug doctor” has to be used in a calming manner. The long pandemic time had triggered strong fears in many people that the population was under constant stress, which was felt much more strongly in January than last year in the first lockdown.
The fear leads to the fact that one no longer comes to the consultation hour and prefers the telephone consultation, important routine examinations would be postponed, which of course endangers the early detection of diseases. “We have set up our own infection clinic, which is separated from the normal clinic in terms of time and space. We carry out up to 25 rapid tests a day. Nevertheless, significant income losses can be felt,” says Oliver Herrmann. In his capacity as a palliative doctor in the Maria Frieden hospice, where fortunately no one has been infected, he noted other effects of the corona measures: “The hospice residents are less visited and suffer more from loneliness.” The visit is possible with a face mask and a safe distance, but here again the fear of the visitors is in the foreground. The fitter among the residents, who previously would have left the facility for a short period of time, no longer do so because they would then have to be quarantined for ten days. “I’m also worried about lonely old people and their relatives,” said Herrmann. “I am sure we will have to deal with the psychological devastation of the Corona measures for a long time to come.”
For him, however, there are clear positive effects that affect nature: “Nature is beginning to recover. I have seldom had so many dead flies on my windshield as last summer.” You can watch a lot of birds again, and there have been wonderful light phenomena in the sky: “That shows us that we have to be much more careful with nature.” The coronavirus passes from animals to humans. “We do not have the right to constantly put our welfare above animal welfare and to violate boundaries. We still have a lot to learn in this regard,” says Herrmann. After recovering from illness, he himself has returned to 100 percent of his capacity.
Oliver Herrmann
Dr. Oliver Herrmann, 55, married, two adult children, lives in Offenburg and runs the group practice in Hofweier with colleagues. As a palliative doctor, he is a manager in the Ortenau palliative care team and as a hospice doctor in the Maria Frieden hospice. As a guest lecturer at the Caritas-Akademie Freiburg, Herrmann teaches on hospice and palliative topics. He has a number of honorary tasks: he is a member of the board of directors of the Paul Gerhard Werk, second chairman of the Friends of Hospice Ortenau and a member of the Ethics Forum of the Resurrection Community.
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