My pain persisted and the many treatments took up a lot of time and posed an added burden to my already impaired health. I began to despair. 

My dentist did not know what to do next and suspected I had a deeper infection. He therefore performed an operation in my mouth cavity to try, at long last, to get to the root of the problem. I felt very weak afterwards and had significant swelling. However the most devastating part of the whole procedure was that it was all for nothing – the pain was still there.

By then I was completely desperate, but my dentist reacted indignantly to this. I complained to him that he had treated me for half a year with no success at all. He appeared to have reached his limits and also had no idea what to do next. The only one chance I had left, he said, was to go to see the best specialists. And so he recommended Professor Sailer.  

Professor Sailer is a completely different kind of doctor. A doctor that is interested in people, as is possible to see from the following lines. 

Based on the previously unsuccessful results, he suspected a very serious diagnosis and sent a tissue sample for testing to an appropriate laboratory. The result was negative, meaning that everything was normal. 

However, with his decades of experience, Professor Sailer found this hard to believe and sent a second tissue sample to a different laboratory. They again found nothing. Professor Sailer did not give up. He said that I was a young man with a family of three small children and the inconclusive search was unacceptable. “There has to be ‘something’ and we will find out what it is.” He thus sent a third tissue sample to a further laboratory, and we got back a result that should actually have been devastating to me: malignant cancer! 

Nevertheless, my first reaction was relief at having finally discovered what was wrong with me.  Professor Sailer immediately referred me to the most experienced oncologist to ensure I could get treatment as fast as possible. I was then given exactly the right chemotherapy for this type of cancer. 

Today I now know that I had unbelievably good luck in my misfortune, because only a short time afterwards my body could have been full of metastasis, as this type of cancer is one of the family of blood cancers (leukaemia) that can spread very quickly throughout the entire body.

During the entire period of my chemotherapy treatment Professor Sailer and his colleague at the clinic, Dr. Jacobsen, rang me up again and again to check on my condition. No doctor had done this up to then. 

Today, two years later, my health is very good again. I think of it as a nightmare from which I have finally awoken. It does not bear thinking about – that if I had never encountered this top medical expert and friend of the people, Professor Sailer, it could have ended differently and my children would no longer have a father.

I will never be able to express just how grateful I am to Professor Sailer.