My life facing cancer (14/16): companions on bad days

Clémentine Vergnaud was a journalist at franceinfo. She died on December 23, 2023 after battling cancer detected a year and a half earlier. She was 31 years old. On June 1, the podcast she cared about so much was released. First ten episodes where she recounted her fight against illness, her hopes and her doubts. For, she said, “leave a trace”. A few weeks before her death, from her hospital room, Clémentine wanted to resume the thread of her testimony. This is the fourth of the last six chapters of “My life facing cancer: Clémentine’s diary”.

What’s great about the podcast is that I’ve met people who have truly been my traveling companions. These fellow travelers are cancer patients. I received lots of testimonies and I didn’t necessarily connect with everyone, but there were people with whom it was quite foundational, with whom the stories completely overlapped, or were different. But if they were different in the illness process, they were very similar in what we felt, in what we experienced. And that is something extremely rich.

I can’t name them all, but there are at least two that come to mind, including one who died recently. Her name was Marie, she was a few years older than me, she lived in Toulouse and she had pancreatic cancer. And Marie and I were diagnosed almost at the same time. Unfortunately, she had two children while I have stepchildren but I do not have a direct child that I will leave orphaned or orphaned when the day comes.

“Marie and I were mirrors”

Marie and I, every time something happened on her side, something happened on mine. We were mirrors, in fact. As soon as I had a problem, and found myself in the hospital, I wrote to her, and she told me: but it’s not possible, this happens to me too… And we talked a lot about these galleys. In the end, we laughed a lot about it, sometimes we had a competition to see who vomited the most during the day… It’s stupid, but it was stuff like that. And not being able to do that anymore is… It’s terrible to be confronted with the absence of the other when perhaps, somewhere, we say to ourselves that the other will never be go away since he is sick, like you, in fact. Maybe that’s it. Losing Marie was horrible, very brutal. She told me one Sunday evening that… I knew things weren’t going well, and I too, it was a time when I was coming out of takotsubo*, so it wasn’t going well either. And she announces to me, on Sunday: “Listen Clementine, this time they told me that there was nothing more they could do and that it was over.”

I was very bad, very sad, and I tried to find a few words. And then afterward, I said to myself: all I can do is offer to call me whenever she wants and I’ll give her a few days to breathe. I imagined very well that, like at the beginning of the illness, this is the moment when you have to announce to lots of people that you are not going to make it. It requires a lot of energy and a lot of investment and I said to myself: that’s it, I’ll give him a few days for that. And unfortunately, these few days that I let pass were too long. On Thursday, her sister sent me a message to tell me that that’s it, she was leaving, that she was in deep and continuous sedation, that she could still hear a little of what we were saying to her but that it was finished. And everything I would have liked to tell him, I didn’t tell him, in the matter… And that remains an immense and very brutal loss. She gave me so much that I wish I could tell her everything she gave me back. That was Marie. She was a beautiful person and I would like us not to forget her because she truly was incredible.

And then there is a second person that I met completely by chance, on Twitter: Gabriel. He is a rabbi. We have nothing at all in common basically, we don’t have the same cancer at all, but Gabriel is someone who is extremely spiritual, because of his position. And we found each other well. We often discussed our impressions as cancer patients, particularly towards others. That moment when after six-eight months, you have the impression that the others are getting tired: you’re not dead, so it’s okay, in the end! All these needs which were very listened to, very heard before, are much less so. We have the impression that, finally, the disease is no longer really there: people end up trivializing it and saying to themselves that it is not a very serious cancer, since we are here. After six or eight months, if you’re not already dead, it’s going to be okay, actually! And I think that casually, it gets into the heads of a lot of people who don’t dare say it.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have any good news”

We talked a lot about all these things, how we experience things, how we envisage the end, how far we are ready to go, what these trials represent for us. And I have to say that we found each other with Gabriel. There’s something we’re connected to. We understand quite quickly where the other is coming from, we also share moments of fatigue, of discouragement — “I can’t take it anymore, what’s the point anyway”…And it feels good to be able to say, sometimes, what you can’t say to others. I don’t mean that you can’t even tell a psychologist, but yes, there are still two or three things that feel good to say. It’s not that we know that there won’t be any judgment, but we know that it won’t hurt to say it. This is also what makes it very difficult to communicate with people who do not have cancer: sometimes, we know that what we say is almost cruel for others to hear. . There, we have this space where we know that we can say anything to each other and it feels good. It’s just liberating.

Social media helped me when the podcast came out because I really felt a lot less alone. Receiving these floods of diverse and varied testimonies really helped me. I said to myself: already, I am not alone in my struggle, there are others. In the current period, it has become heavier, more complicated, because we take a place in people’s lives. They tell you: “I don’t know you, but actually, I feel like I’ve known you forever.” And it’s very nice, it’s adorable, but there is a moment when it becomes exhausting, so many requests. I don’t know how many I have left…. I have at least 50 to 70 messages that I haven’t responded to, even if only on Instagram. But now, I can’t do it anymore. And I’m in a period where I won’t do it anymore, actually, because I’m not there anymore. People are always waiting for more news, they are waiting for good news. And unfortunately, I don’t have good news.

Takotsubo: Takotsubo syndrome, or broken heart syndrome, is a cardiomyopathy that often begins after emotional stress or severe pain. The symptoms are generally the same as those of a heart attack. To be continued :

always one step ahead.