Covid-19 itself, but also the treatment in the intensive care unit, often leaves serious marks on the body: With a new early rehabilitation department, the Gautingen Lung Clinic is countering the consequences of particularly serious illnesses.
Gauting - The corona pandemic is not only changing everyone's everyday life, it is also changing medical structures: this has been good to see since Monday in the Asklepios lung clinic in Gauting. The new department for early rehabilitation started operations there. Not the only, but “a main reason” for this was the consequences of severe Covid 19 courses and their treatment in the intensive care unit, says Medical Director Dr. Wolfgang Gesierich. "We are bundling the entire acute medical expertise of the lung clinic in this department."
The early rehabilitation ward should pave the way from the hospital bed back to a self-determined life. For many Covid patients, it is a very long time after the acute treatment in the intensive care unit. The disease has caused heart attacks and strokes or has left scars on the lung tissue. After weeks, you have to relearn how to speak and swallow with a breathing tube in your throat. Just like walking, because the muscles have lost a lot.
Some continue to plague headaches, shortness of breath, cough, tightness in the chest area or depression.
Often a lot of it comes together, the patients are then far from ready for a self-determined life - not even for a referral to a rehabilitation clinic.
"And that's where we come in," says Dr.
Robert Simmerlein, senior geriatric physician and jointly responsible for the early rehabilitation department, which is supposed to ensure a smooth transition.
As complex as the consequences of the coronavirus are, so are the forms of treatment
As complex as the consequences of the coronavirus are, so are the forms of treatment. “Individual therapy plans are worked out in a large team,” explains Simmerlein. The team includes physiotherapists, respiratory therapists and occupational therapists, as well as speech therapists, psychologists and the hospital's social services. It is about analyzing “what the patient was able to do before” and “where he wants to go again” - in other words, “fighting back to everyday life”. As head of the geriatrics department, which is focused on the elderly, this getting fit after surgery is nothing really new for Simmerlein. "But so far there has not been such an offer for younger Covid patients." In the long term, the early rehabilitation ward is to provide 18 beds. The ulterior motive: those who are mobilized early are less likely to be dependent on help and care.
The people with the toughest disease courses usually stay in the intensive care unit for between three and six weeks, says Gesierich, the medical director. In Gauting (and beyond) a Covid patient is considered to be acutely ill for the first four weeks. Then one speaks of the persistent Covid syndrome. Post-Covid Syndrome (also known as Long Covid) is attributed to those who still struggle with restrictions after three months. The most common symptom is called fatigue - chronic exhaustion and listlessness. Long-lasting corona consequences are also noticeable in the workplace for some - for example in the form of lack of concentration. The Gilching internist Dr. Markus von Rebay with me again and again. He also mentions "vascular problems" as a result of a corona infection. To his patientswhose lungs were the most weakened, he remembers well - it was, of all things, a mountaineer and a saxophone player. “They recovered with a lot of breathing exercises,” says von Rebay.
ENT doctor Dr.
Bernhard Junge-Hülsing often has to do with "permanent smell and taste disorders".
And what do you do about it?
Just as intensive care patients have to learn to swallow and walk again, so it is with sensory perception, explains Junge-Hülsing.
He advises smelling training “with smells that are well known” - that could be the scent of bananas, sage or peppers.
Regardless of whether and what consequences the virus has left behind: The ENT doctor advises everyone to “be completely turned upside down” six months after the infection - in other words, to do a health check at the family doctor.
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The majority of the Seefeld municipal council decided on Tuesday evening how to proceed in terms of the new Seefeld clinic. Against the five votes of the Greens / BI, the local politicians set the date for a request for a council for Sunday, June 27th.
