Shielded: Laurenz wears ear plugs or hearing protection almost around the clock because everyday noises would be too stressful for him.
Image: Ute Sopha
Music, sport, friends – Laurenz enjoyed his life. Today, even short conversations exhaust him: the 22-year-old from Frankfurt suffers from the mysterious and so far incurable disease ME/CFS.
EIt was in the summer of 2021. Laurenz got his second Covid vaccination just in time for his camping holiday in France. He was 19 years old at the time, a young man who enjoyed listening to music, going to concerts, playing basketball, meeting friends in the park and going to parties. He did an internship in an architectural office, started studying, left home and moved into a shared apartment. But he wants to spend his camping holiday on the Atlantic coast with his family like before – his mother, her partner and his younger sister.
In France, cold symptoms then appear: cough, runny nose, the usual. A corona test is negative. So there's no reason to worry, even if you feel more tired than usual with a cold. After returning home from vacation, he still feels exhausted and listless. “Then a day came when he thought he was over the mountain,” says his mother, Ute Sopha, two and a half years later. She came to the meeting in a café in Frankfurt's Nordend to speak on behalf of her son.
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