“You are our last hope,” says the lady, whose elegant appearance stands in stark contrast to the sobriety of the environment in which she formulates this sentence. She and her husband are waiting in front of a treatment room on the ground floor of a hospital in Pasing. This morning, the couple flew from their home country of Italy to their second home in Munich to have the man’s hearing checked. The woman to whom the sentence with the last hope applies is called Veronika Wolter, and this is not the first time she has heard it. She is not a highly specialized researcher for a rare, life-threatening disease, as the force of the statement might suggest. “What I do is not necessary for survival,” says the ENT doctor herself.
Nevertheless, many of her patients have great expectations when they make an appointment with Wolter. Because the doctor not only has a wealth of knowledge, but also a very special wealth of experience. At the age of nine, Veronika Wolter fell ill with meningitis, which led to hearing impairment bordering on deafness. She completed school and medical school without being able to hear. 13 years ago, after beginning her specialist training, Wolter received so-called cochlear implants, which use highly specialized technology to take over the function of her defective inner ear and allow her to hear well again. “It gave me my life back,” says Veronika Wolter. And since then it has made it its task to give her patients exactly this feeling of regained participation.
