How five years of care, recovery and rehabilitation changed my perspective on communication and reputation.

For years, I thought I understood how trust worked. I spent nearly two decades working as a PR strategist, helping executives, entrepreneurs and innovators sharpen their narratives, define their positions and increase their visibility. We searched for the right message, the right moment and the right journalist. I believed that a good story would ultimately create trust. That was, after all, my profession. Until I became a patient myself.

Meningitis changed my life profoundly. What started as an apparently ordinary ear infection grew into a medical crisis, followed by years of neurological rehabilitation, hearing loss and hospital check-ups. My world became smaller, yet I tried to make it bigger at the same time. I travelled, explored and enjoyed life, but I also ran away from it. I sought stability in excessive exercise and control, in the bathhouses of Budapest and the hammams of Marrakesh. Where my diary once revolved around strategies, clients and plans, my life was now defined by energy, recovery and the next appointment.

During those years, I discovered something I had never truly considered as a communications consultant. When you are a patient, you listen differently. You do not listen to words to judge them, but to find something to hold onto. You try not only to understand what a doctor is saying, but above all what it means for your life. You look for certainty, while the person opposite you can sometimes only honestly say that certainty does not yet exist. That is where my view of communication began to change.

I discovered that trust does not arise because someone chooses the right words. Trust arises when words align with reality; when expectations are expressed honestly; when someone also dares to say what they do not yet know. That sounds self-evident, yet I realised that for years I had worked from a different starting point. I thought communication began the moment an organisation put its story out into the world.

Now I believe communication begins much earlier.

Stay healthy

R | L