Adrienne was often sick, with spondylitis that frequently kept her bedridden. According to von Balthasar, she always became ill before Easter and sensed that this was connected with Good Friday. She came to understand her physical suffering as a way of sharing in the pain of others, and she spent much time with the patients at her uncle's psychiatric hospital near Bern, where she discovered a gift for consoling the sick. Theodor von Speyr, Adrienne's father, died of gastrointestinal perforation in January 1918, when she was fifteen. After his death, Adrienne studied at a business school at her mother's request, in addition to her work at the gymnasium. Just a few months later, she contracted tuberculosis, and doctors believed she would die within a year. She was sent to a sanatorium at Leysin, where she was cared for by her cousin, a physician. Her mother rarely wrote or visited. At the sanatorium, von Speyr learned Russian, read Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and was invited to give lectures to fellow patients. One of these talks reportedly prompted her friend Louisa Jacques (later the Poor Clare Sister Mary of the Holy Trinity) to remark, "You're going to make me become a Catholic." At Leysin, Adrienne, too, began to feel drawn to the Roman Catholic Church.