“I experienced the illness, and it changes everything”

“The illness fell on me suddenly, one summer evening, by telephone, like a violent clap of thunder. A doctor tells me that I have breast cancer. In a few seconds, I pass “to the other side of the office”, among the patients. I react like them: I wonder what the treatments will be and how I will organize myself – I then work in the rural sector with a very busy schedule. A few days earlier, I had announced to one of my patients that she had breast cancer with metastases. It was thinking of her that I hurried to act the day I myself felt a lump in my body.

When I arrived in the cancer ward, I really fell over to the sick side, I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. I learned to be a “patient”, in every sense of the word: I had to stop my mind from racing, from imagining therapeutic options, from interpreting the results. I understood that cancer requires a long period of psychological reconstruction, well after the end of treatment. Today, I listen even more to patients. Like them, I know the dull worry, the fatigue, the loss of hair… I have experienced these illnesses in my body. I can tell them, “I know.” And that changes everything. »

His book: To my caring body, Ed. of the Net, 228 p. ; €18.