My life facing cancer (15/16): always one step ahead

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 fifth of the last six chapters of “My life facing cancer: Clémentine’s diary”.

I won’t say that I was told something as such. I would say that we ended up coming together, with the medical team. After the takotsubo*, I had about three weeks of respite. Clearly, I was in trouble because of the heart attack, we’re not going to lie. But year after year, on the side of cancer, we were always present. And then after three weeks, I had another incident with the prostheses which are placed in my bile ducts. They wanted to organize an operation, I started coughing up blood the morning of the operation, the operation had to be postponed, the anesthetists did not want to operate on me in these conditions… A whole series of complications which What I saw was that we were always running behind the disease, but that it was always one step ahead. That she was watching us from afar.

And it’s funny — I compared it to that the other day and it ultimately doesn’t seem odd to me: it’s a bit The House of Paper. This series where you have this man who plans to rob the mint and is always one step ahead of the cops, well! us, that was it. The illness, whatever we planned, it always had a side effect, it always had a complication to present to us to limit us which meant that at one point, even the snake bit its tail: if we wanted to do something, we had to do another one but we couldn’t… And after a while, I felt enormous weariness. And I understood. I understood. We would never catch up with the disease again.

“The most delicate discussion about stopping treatment that we can have”

I felt the look of the caregivers change a little, but without really telling me. I talked about it a lot with the psychologist who followed me at the hospital and I told her: at some point, we will have to have this truth talk with the oncologists. Because I had always refused to let it happen to me overnight. “Hello Madame Vergnaud, finally, there is nothing more we can do, goodbye Madame Vergnaud.” That was out of the question for me! And it was very well heard. And it turns out that on Tuesday, there is the big university visit: normally, there are all the interns, externs, nurses, lots of people, all the doctors… And that day, they are not only four or five came. I was like, Okay, that’s it. Finally, we’re going to talk about all this for real.

And my oncologist gave me the same speech that I had in mind: yes, from now on, we were running a little behind the disease. On the new chemo that we had tried to put in place, a chemo with a different product to avoid a heart attack, we had managed to do one session and they weren’t even sure if they could give me a second one. And in these conditions, it seemed complicated to continue, medically but also ethically. And he was very human. It relieved me immensely to hear it from him. Because when you are there in your head, there is a moment when you feel guilty, where you say to yourself: it’s me who is giving up, it’s me who no longer has this strength and who lacks of courage, finally. It’s very guilty. We say to ourselves: I’m letting go… But why don’t I actually hang on? And to hear that, even in the voices of doctors, it would be a mistake to cling to this point, it did me a lot of good. And from there, we were able to discuss the different options available to me to leave in the best possible conditions, corresponding to me, with as much dignity as possible. And it was a while… Just like I said that I probably had the best cancer announcement anyone could have, I think I had the most difficult discussion about stopping the treatments with them.

“I know all the doctors, all the nurses, and they know me by heart”

It was therefore decided to no longer do any treatment since from now on it would be of no use, the disease is going too quickly. And several possibilities were offered to me: hospitalization at home which I did not want, because that already made me lose my place and my bed in this department. And that, in the event of worsening pain, if you do not have the guarantee of being able to be rehospitalized in your department, it is still very distressing. And then hospitalization at home means longer delays: the time to contact the doctor when things are not going well is very complicated. I also know that on Grégoire’s side, it was something complicated to say that I could leave the apartment we occupy, and continue to live there afterwards. Which I completely understand. The other option was to still be at the Paul-Brousse hospital where I am being followed, but in the palliative care unit where, ultimately, it is the same thing as the department where I am there, but with more doctors, more nurses… A slightly more complete and strengthened team, we’ll say, but it’s a team that I don’t know. I was offered, and I accepted, to stay in this department that I have now known for a year and a half.

I know all the doctors, all the nurses by their first name. It’s a real family, they know me by heart, they surround me very well. They are very attentive, they are responsive… Really, they give the best of themselves so that everything goes as smoothly as possible from day to day. And I decided to keep this team. So I will be hospitalized until I die in this hospital. With permission possibilities, for the moment during the week and not at night, because we find it too fragile — and I completely agree. But if tomorrow I feel good and I say: listen, I would like to spend the day at home, well they say go! We reassess the pain, we are given what we need to make the day safer, so that I don’t find myself in a difficult moment. And then I go home if I want.

“I finally had the right to let go”

Survival time is very complicated for doctors, because these are illnesses that have fairly unpredictable developments. We saw it clearly in my case, there were times when it was very positive for a very long time and then suddenly, we had a series of deteriorations. It’s clearly impossible to predict. I was told: it could be several weeks or several months. I don’t know. Maybe in three days I will deteriorate and it will be over. Maybe it will take three months. It’s impossible to say. It’s difficult to manage, obviously, when you’re the sick one, because you don’t know how much time you have left.

Overall, at the beginning, it was really relief that dominated because I finally had the right to say stop. I finally had the right to let go. We were no longer in all these side effects, all these operations to be scheduled… We were no longer in this… It felt a lot of good. And then afterwards, comes the moment when you announce it to your loved ones. I have a family that lives quite far away, overall. So that means seeing your loved ones again without knowing if it’s the last time you see them. That’s extremely hard. And disheartening because we often experience very beautiful moments of emotion. But when people leave, we are ruined. On an emotional level, I break down every time, because it’s terrible not knowing if you’re going to see them again. It’s terrible to say goodbye like that to people you love.

Overall, until then, fear was pretty much far from me. And there was a case a few days ago where fear gripped me in a way… It was the first time I felt it so strongly: in a way where it compresses the rib cage, where we feels that fear is rising and it is not coming down. We can be afraid of many things. For me, at the time, it was the fear of this moment when, definitively, I will close my eyes and where, definitively, I do not know what will happen next.

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 :

the experience of a lifetime.