Tanja Schuster can only smile about a regular reaction to her career choice.

She hears her again and again: “Oh shit!” Or, a little more chosen in the expression, but identical in content: “I couldn't do that.” She immediately has an answer ready: “You don't have to.” She, however, has to somehow yes, because she wants it that way.

She was not always a nurse in palliative medicine, in other words, where people are exhausted from therapy and are often very close to death.

She has only been doing this since last year, the Corona year.

But the trained nurse, who has been out of her job for so long, is far from fear of contact, and from shrinking from human suffering.

That is why she says: “I am so happy that I am back in my job.” It was a long and often painful way to get there. 

Uwe Marx

Editor in business.

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The fact that she returned to her professional roots last year of all times has to do with a mixture of chance and stamina. She did not change because of Corona, but despite Corona, she says. It was just about time - after years at a clinic, further education, at university in new subjects, as a single mother of two daughters and finally in school in a completely different profession. So now it's medicine again: The 52-year-old woman from Frankfurt works in a mobile palliative team in the Sachsenhausen district, visits seriously ill people at home or in nursing homes, advises, explains, speaks well, and accompanies them on the last journey. Not all of their patients are terminally ill, but the end is in sight. Not exactly a terrain where the pandemic is far away.That makes this demanding work with predominantly older people even more demanding. She didn't care.

Even after completing her training as a nurse at the University Hospital in Frankfurt, Tanja Schuster could have chosen more relaxed medical niches.

Her mother often said: “Go to the gynecology department.” Nothing against having children, but she decided on a different address: the HIV ward.

Basically there were two wards, one for HIV patients and one for those with tuberculosis.

Many were sick with both.

At that time, in the early 1990s, HIV infection was not considered to be easily treatable, but rather a sinister threat.

She scared many, but not Tanja Schuster.

She was more curious, she says, because so little was known about it.

"A lot was died"

When patients were brought to the university clinic from smaller, less well-known hospitals, the attendants sometimes wore full-body protective suits. It was a time of great uncertainty. And death was omnipresent. “A lot of people died,” says Tanja Schuster. She remembers a weekend when more people died than could fit in the station's own cooling chamber. Some of the dead were temporarily stored in the rooms with the windows open - luckily it was winter. But her strongest memory is another one: "It was great, super-dedicated care," she says.