Moderator Anna Kraft was diagnosed with MS six and a half years ago. In the interview, she tells how she found out about it and how she is doing now.
Sports presenter Anna Kraft (35) is now also public about her MS diagnosis. In an interview with the magazine “Bunte”, she talks about the day when she noticed that “something was going wrong” and about her fears, especially in the professional field.
“I went to the hairdresser’s, which usually takes longer, and thought I had pinched a nerve,” she recalls on December 16, six and a half years ago. At home she wanted to release the tension with a hot shower, but she “just didn’t feel the hot water on her back”. She drove to the ambulance of the Munich University Hospital. “I was hoping that the doctors would fix me and then everything would be fine,” she says. Instead, she never got out of the hospital.
After many examinations, the doctor said to her: “You have MS – multiple sclerosis.” Anna Kraft said that this diagnosis was “totally overwhelmed”. “At first I didn’t know what that was and what that meant.” The photo of a young woman in a wheelchair, which was shown on an information brochure, “totally shocked” her, remembers the former athlete.
“I was afraid to show weakness”
For many years Anna Kraft kept her chronic illness a secret. “I was afraid of showing weakness – or of being attributed to it: that my employers say she is not resilient, we cannot send her there because she cannot endure the stress of travel or because she is sick in the end,” she summarizes their previous worries together. “For a long time I thought that if I did that publicly, that would be my job.”
But things turned out differently and today she even dares to go public. “I’ve learned that even if you’re in an apparently hopeless situation, somehow things go on, also because I want it to go on,” says Kraft.
What was MS doing to her?
“MS is an autoimmune disease – the body fights itself,” explains Anna Kraft. When she was diagnosed with her, “I was paralyzed on one side,” she recalls. “I could no longer walk, hold a glass, cut anything, no longer go to the toilet alone. I just fell over in the bathroom at the clinic,” said Kraft. That went on for two weeks. After a “cortisone cure”, the “foci of inflammation on the left hemisphere” improved. She was given medication and went into rehab.
Since then she has had “a few violent attacks”. But because the symptoms “always creep in”, you can be reasonably prepared for them. The former competitive athlete receives infusions on a regular basis.
How does the partnership cope with such a diagnosis?
Anna Kraft did not allow her family happiness to be spoiled. She and her partner, soccer commentator Wolff-Christoph Fuss (45), had two daughters (born in 2018, 2020) after the diagnosis. “During the two pregnancies I had the best time since the diagnosis,” says Anna Kraft.
“Of course everyone – especially myself – first had to get used to the diagnosis, but we mastered that very well and only made Wolff and me even closer as a couple,” she says. He is her husband for life, even without a marriage certificate “.
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