Ah, yes, my nice little attic rooms in H3, the transplantation ward. My favourite is Number 10 with two windows looking to different sides. No, I do not have a donor heart in my chest and I am not a candidate for one – definitely not at 75 years of age.

Nevertheless, the heart centre has been my refuge for 15 years whenever my heart, as is so often the case, is in trouble. Roland Hetzer and his colleagues have extended my life by 15 years as compared to the initial prognosis which gave me two years when it all began.

The only thing is: why a transplantation ward? That is where I was quickly parked for a short spell. I am indeed at home everywhere in Ludwig Hoffmann’s palazzo which has just turned a 100 years old. In H1, surgery, and H2, cardiology, finally in the cellar, too, where senior physician Stefan Dreysse threads in the catheter with the gentlest hands, dilating stenoses and inserting stents. Once in the building, the visit to the X-ray room in the cellar is not left out and depending on who happens to be pottering about my heart, I am cared for in the surgical outpatients clinic by the jovial Beate Schaumann, in the cardiologic outpatients clinic by Stefan Götze or by the "echo man" Henryk Siniawski.

Familiar places in the entire building.
Well-known names of the nurses in the glassed-in command room of the ward. Now what did Gänsicke have? A look in the computer and they find my long cardiac criminal record. I feel really claustrophobic in my room so I read a newspaper with a cup of coffee in my hand in the comfortable lounges in H1 and H2. Only the memories of the intensive care ward are fuzzy where I woke up after the operation. Sorry, but the blurring effects of the narcosis pulls a curtain in front of my perception. I have scurried around the building for the past 15 years. No wonder that Roland Hetzer with his rolling "R" once called me a "professional patient".

How do you get to be one? Quite simple. A great anterior infarction 15 years ago. The main branch of the left coronary artery is 100 percent blocked. The fire department brings me to the Behring Hospital where there is no catheter laboratory and so they can’t dilate the narrow spot. They don’t dare to carry out a thrombolysis, a dissolving of the blockage with drugs, because my duodenum had once bled. The result was ventricular fibrillation, unconsciousness, electroshocks, lung failure, kidney failure. Americans would say "snafu" – "systems nearly all fouled up."

I am put into an induced coma, artificial respiration, tracheotomy, fed by nasal tubes and at the sport where my kidneys are on strike a dialysis machine. After 80 days I regain consciousness, my lungs and kidneys are working again, but my heart is hobbling. In the meantime 103 X-rays have been taken of me and I have been given 43 blood transfusions. I have to start from scratch again: learn to speak, eat, write, sit, stand – right from the beginning. The Behring doctors pulled me through in a professional and caring manner. Not even my behind is sore.

The heart, however, is devastated. Behind the blocked spot in the artery almost the entire anterior wall of the left ventricle has become necrotic. The heart muscle changes into dead connective tissue because it is no longer supplied with blood. Doctors call this "remodelling". As soon as I am capable of being transported, I am brought into the heart institute.

In December 1991, Roland Hetzer and Eckart Fleck stand at my bed, H1, Room 2. I know both gentlemen. We met in the Axel Springer Publishing House where I was an editor for over 30 years. How were things to continue from here? Fleck urges Hetzer to make the worn-out left ventricle smaller and cut out the aneurysm. Hetzer shakes his head. " Earlier", he says in his rugged Bohemian accent, "we simply pinched off such a lump of the heart with everyone." The results, however, were not always good. That is why he would rather carefully try to let it continue to live with the use of drugs. A conservative approach. It works, monitored by Wolfgang Dissmann, the Berlin cardiologist who brought Hetzer from Hanover to Berlin in 1986.

part 2