Heinz Hoenig was diagnosed with dementia: his wife makes serious allegations

It was months of anxiety: actor Heinz Hoenig has been battling several serious illnesses since the spring. The 73-year-old spent five months alone in the intensive care unit. His wife Annika Hoenig deals with the difficult time in a new podcast. Right at the beginning of the drama there was a misdiagnosis – which could only be corrected because of Ms. Hoenig’s own experience.

The actor complained of shortness of breath at the end of March, she reports in the podcast “(No) Summer in Berlin 2024”. “He was barely resilient anymore, constantly tired and physically exhausted,” she says. She decided to take him to a clinic. Pneumonia was initially suspected. In the days that followed, her husband became increasingly delirious. This manifested itself in the fact that he “said confusing stuff and was completely disoriented in terms of time and place,” said Hoenig. During the interview she requested, a young doctor almost casually made a harsh diagnosis: her husband had dementia.

Heinz Hoenig: Dementia diagnosis

Honey fell from every cloud. “I worked for many years in a primary psychiatric ward with people with severe dementia and if my husband had had any signs of dementia, that would have been the first thing I noticed,” she says, astonished by the approving diagnosis. “To diagnose someone with dementia requires far more diagnostic work than just 5 minutes of observation a day, if at all.”

But the young doctor didn’t let that dissuade her. So Hoenig says he started his own search.

What is really behind the disease?

She had an advantage over many relatives: the 39-year-old had worked in nursing and geriatric care for years. She asked for the medical records. And she stumbled upon two important values: the HB value and the blood oxygen were very low, she remembers. “I mean, any of us with that kind of value would have an absolute loss of touch with reality,” she is certain. Your suspicion: Instead of dementia, anemia could be behind it.

She asked for further diagnoses, she says. “Because it naturally made sense to me that there had to be a source of bleeding somewhere in his body.” But that was anything but easy. Hoenig did not have health insurance at the time – and further blood tests were not part of emergency care, she was told by a doctor. Eventually she was able to have a gastroscopy, which revealed an inflammation of the esophagus.

Fear again

But even then the drama wasn’t over. Medication helped, but a new illness landed the actor back in the hospital in the summer. There the real reason for his weakness was finally discovered: a stent inserted in 2012 had become infected. “Then I thought: Okay, then a new stent will be installed,” says Hoenig. But it wasn’t that easy, she admits. “Unfortunately, my limited medical knowledge was completely wrong.”

Because the real solution is much more complicated: Hoenig needs a new aorta, i.e. a new main artery. “You sometimes see it in films when doctors tell the patient a terrible diagnosis and then they can no longer listen,” she describes her reaction. “For me, there was Sense first.”

The operation is still pending and Hoenig is waiting for a donor organ. The path there doesn’t seem to be easy, his wife reveals. “The whole chaos really started with this diagnosis,” she ends the episode. And promises to reveal more about it in the next one.

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