Clémentine Lecalot-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 second of the last five chapters of “My life facing cancer: Clémentine’s diary”.
At the beginning, I said to myself: they are asking for Samu because it is Samu that we need to ask for and not a simple ambulance. But when I see the speed… We don’t stop once… I say to myself: yeah, there’s definitely a problem. And where the threshold is really crossed is when I arrive at Henri-Mondor in the cardiology intensive care unit and straight away, I have ten people around me. There, I tell myself that there is really a problem. I have the intern, with the ultrasound machine doing an ultrasound again, which is very quiet. Usually when doctors are silent, it’s not very good. People are starting to explain to me that I won’t be able to get out of bed. Above all, never. And then, the intern comes back to see me and says: “Ma’am, your heart has a problem. It can’t contract properly to get blood out.” When it contracts to evacuate the blood, so that it goes to all the organs, it expels very little. 60, 65% is about normal for people; I’m at 15. So, it’s super scary. She explains to me that she will have to install a “central line”, that is to say a catheter which passes in the neck, which goes to the heart to properly diffuse the products. That’s not reassuring either.
On Tuesday morning the intern and his referent arrive, who is an adorable woman. And they start to tell me: “Well, Ms. Vergnaud, it doesn’t look very good, we’re not going to hide it from you. We have two hypotheses. Either there really is cardiac toxicity from the chemotherapy on your heart and there, overall, we won’t be able to do anything do, because we are already almost at the maximum of medications. In this case, your organs will fail one after the other and you will die. Either, this is what we call takotsubo syndrome, the broken heart syndrome.” It’s simply the fact that with too much emotional or physical load, your heart tenses up and suddenly, it can no longer contract properly. So, this ties in with the issue of blood expulsion. They tell me: “So there, it’s completely reversible. Except that we don’t know if you’ve reached the lowest. If you haven’t reached the lowest, it’s going to be complicated.”
And they explain to me very gently that the resuscitation team is going to come into my room to see if I have already thought about my advance directives, if I have any wishes, if… How do I see the things, so that they too, afterwards, can make a decision between themselves, between doctors. And I am in tears on my bed: obviously I have already thought about death, since the start of this illness. But I had always seen cancer as something very slow, of slow and progressive deterioration. And there, I feel like I’m hitting a wall in my head and not knowing what I should do.
“I was not a heart case, I was a whole with cancer”
Basically, they ask me if I want to go to intensive care, in which case it will be with huge tubes in the groin, on each side of the groin, to pump my blood and circulate it in an external machine so that my heart rests. It means lying down all the time, and with no guarantee that I’ll get through it, too. They don’t know how long it will last. So if it lasts two months, well! the cancer, behind it, it has won, it is no longer of any use. And having this decision to make was the hardest moment of hospitalization. Really. I never thought I would be faced with this at that time. It was extremely hard. And I think I made it clear to the resuscitator quite well that I was incapable of choosing, that I didn’t have all the cards in my hands, all the medical knowledge in my file in my hands. She said : “Listen, we’ll discuss it with the staff and then we’ll discuss it again with you.” That’s what they did. They talked, the intensivists, the cardiologists. And they suggested that my Paul-Brousse team join them in the discussion. And that was very important for me, because I didn’t want to be seen as just a heart patient. I was one with cancer and that’s what made it difficult, in fact.
They told me that, well… They wouldn’t send me to intensive care. That the game wasn’t worth the effort. And so if I didn’t recover, it was ultimately going to be the same scenario as cardiac toxicity: I was going to die little by little. I understand everything and I grasp the horror of everything. My partner is there from the start. My mother arrives the day they tell me all this. She arrives at the hospital early in the afternoon and they also talk to them, a lot. They talk to them about what’s going on with me, the decision they made, why they made it.
“We were at the maximum”
But in the end, it turns out that my heart moved again. It’s always a little inexplicable, but the heart ended up rising, very slowly. Like a big. And maybe also with a lot of dobutamine and Cordarone, heart medications, because really, we were at the max.
He left – I don’t know if it’s thanks to that, but I want to believe it because I found the symbolism very beautiful – at the moment when my companion and my mother returned to my room, that they had all this discussion with the doctors and the doctors came to talk to me about it. And my partner, I see in his eyes that he is lost, he no longer knows where he is, he is facing this kind of tragedy, he feels helpless. He comes closer to me and says: “But what can I do to get your heart going again? Tell me what I can do.” And the only answer that came to me at that moment — and it’s a bit comical because it may seem trivial, but I told him: marry me. And he said yes.
You can get married in a hospital, but it is in very specific cases. This is when there is a threat to life. And so, a few days later, in the hospital room from which almost all the furniture had been cleared, including the bed, so that I was in an armchair, with a civil registrar, with his scarf, and who was perfect in her words because she didn’t overdo it. But the passages emphasizing help, assistance, the passages of the civil code which are read in every marriage… She added a little word each time. She felt that there was no need to even mention it.
To be continued : we loved each other.
Production: Clémentine Lecalot-Vergnaud and Samuel Aslanoff. Director: Laure-Hélène Planchet. Sound recording: Samuel Aslanoff. Mixing: Raphaël Rasson. Visuals: Stéphanie Berlu, Kelsey Suleau. Coordination: Pauline Pennanec’h.