Monica Lierhaus: She had a “ticking time bomb in her head”

It was January 8, 2009 when Monica Lierhaus’ Leben took a dramatic turn. A life -threatening brain aneurysm should be removed in a Hamburg clinic – but the operation went wrong. “Nobody did anything wrong with my operation. It was just bad luck” ,. The 55-year-old particularly moves the fate of the operating professor: “I’m still sorry for the doctor. It was his very last operation before retirement, and then everything goes wrong. The poor man.”

Lierhaus does not believe in fate – but it is in the coincidence of how she explains using the example of her unfulfilled desire to have children. First of all, the Hamburg native wanted to drive her career before she wanted to get children. When it didn’t work, she was disappointed at first. “In retrospect, that was good. A birth would certainly have killed me,” she reflects today. The pressure in the head with the contractions would have “guaranteed the aneurysm” – “a ticking time bomb in the head”, which she had been carrying since birth without knowing it.

The diagnosis came by chance: Lierhaus wanted to be lasered. A friendly doctor advised a previous head. “I still know like yesterday what a bustle suddenly was there,” she recalls the moment of diagnosis. Suddenly, many doctors looked at their shots excitedly and opened the shocking truth.

Until this moment Monica Lierhaus was the star among the sports rapporteurs. She was the first woman to conquer the male domain with confident distance with professional expertise and moderated the big sporting events for Sat.1, Sky, ARD and premiere: Bundesliga, Tour de France, Olympic Games …

After the failed operation on January 8, 2009, Monica Lierhaus was in a coma for four months. The doctors told the family that they would no longer wake up and they should say goodbye. Her sister Eva, then on Florida vacation, came back immediately and always prayed on the plane.

“I had no chance of going. Eva kept me up,” says Lierhaus, underlining the particularly close connection between the sisters, who have only one year and five days of age. “No sheet of paper fits between us. I was even started school a year earlier so that we could go into the same class,” recalls Monica Lierhaus.

On Easter, Monica opened her eyes for the first time – but it was only the beginning of a long way. First she was in a wax coma phase, an excessive brain water pressure made another operation necessary. “Only then did she find a little too awareness. We were all overjoyed. It was the most beautiful around the world for us. Like a new birth.”

Monica had to learn everything again: speak, run, write. The doctors in rehab forecast that she would never be able to go again and had to spend her life in a wheelchair. But: “I marched out of rehab on my own legs.”

She had her first public appearance in 2011 at the awarding of the Golden Camera. Three years later, in 2014, she returned professionally and conducted an interview with the then national coach Jogi Löw for Sport Bild. Since June 2023, she has been part of the RTL sports team and regularly moderates there.