Many of them are publishing their memoirs… While Dave gave an interview to Isabelle Ithurburu on TF1 on the occasion of the release of his memoirs How not to be in love with youit’s the tennis player Henri Leconte who also published his autobiography called New Bullets, published by Marabout. Guest of The Expert’s Eye on Sud Radio this Monday, October 30, 2023, the athlete returned to the most traumatic episode of his life, and from which he still has strong psychological aftereffects: the three weeks of hospitalization that he endured following a virus which caused him to contract devastating meningitiswhich almost cost him his life.
“It was an important moment, and it played a role in the rest of my life. It was something terrible and at the same time exceptional, because I had left, I had signed the papers, suddenly I entered a tunnel, there is a hand next to me which says to me: Come, come, you will see, it’s great; and another who tells me: No, fight, fight. And I woke up, and it took me six months to come back (…) I had an induction. I said to myself: But it’s extraordinary, I’m lucky to still be here. All of a sudden we say to ourselves, it’s extraordinary, we are on earth, we are alive, we must take advantage of it (…) It always bothers me, because, sometimes we still have a few dreams, we are there, we ask ourselves the question : Why am I still here?” said the 1984 Roland-Garros doubles winner.
He lost his balance for more than six months
In his story, Henri Leconte reveals that this meningitis struck him when he was 38 years old, and that he was in the middle of a tennis tournament in Dublin. The athlete felt the first symptoms after a match against the Swiss Jakob Hlasek, and was the target of “vomiting with an unbearable headache”. The man is hospitalized, and quickly learns that he is a victim of a “lightning meningitis”. The word is scary, this disease is often fatal: “You start signing the papers, you tell yourself you’re going to die” confesses the man, now 60 years old. The one who had just come out of hepatitis had to face three weeks of hospitalization, and a long convalescence with damage that could have been irreversible, but which managed to pass over time: “Results, three weeks of hospitalization and a total loss of balance. For six months I was in complete rehabilitation. I even had to learn to walk again.”