Suffering from Charcot’s disease, this former doctor for the Girondins de Bordeaux reveals that he reduced the suffering of a former footballer in 2010. “An act of love” from which he would also like to benefit, legally.
The heart attack he so hoped for arrived at the end of July. Antoine Mesnier grabbed a photo of his children, put on a French XV jersey and went to bed. “You wait and you will die”, he resolved, as his heart gave out. This inveterate smoker had been dreaming of a good old heart attack since, on his 65th birthday, a year and a half earlier, he had learned that he was doomed by Charcot’s disease. This incurable pathology eats away the muscles and destroys respiratory capacity. Once diagnosed, life expectancy is three to five years on average. A “descent into hell” feared by this Bordeaux doctor.
After five minutes of one-on-one time with the afterlife, Antoine Mesnier looked at his sons. “Damn, I didn’t say goodbye to them. Paul is going to be a dad and I’m not going to see that.” He called for help. The nearest ambulance was 50 minutes from his house. A Samu helicopter was dispatched to the rugby field of Saint-Etienne-de-Baïgorry, its refuge in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. In hospital, cardiac arrest. Thirty seconds flat. And “poum”through the magic of anticoagulants, this madman of the oval ball sent death back to his 22 meters. “I will choose the moment”he tells franceinfo.
The adopted Basque actually has one last fight to win: he wants to help change French law on end of life and allow certain patients to benefit from euthanasia. “I who have, all my life, relieved the lives of others, this time I would like to try to relieve their death”he wrote in a book, Happy birthday Antoine (Editions Bouquins-Mollat), released Thursday October 5. He reveals how, during his career as a general practitioner, he himself practiced clandestine euthanasia. A testimony to move the lines.
“I couldn’t stand having done that.”
It’s the story of a promise made to a long-time friend. Patrice Lestage and Antoine Mesnier met in 1991. The first was a professional footballer for the Girondins de Bordeaux, where the second served as club doctor. In the 2000s, Patrick Lestage, in his forties, showed up at his doctor friend’s house following an ordinary run that had exhausted him. “I diagnosed him with Charcot’s disease, which until then I had only encountered in books”he remembers.
After three years of physical degradation, paralyzed, his friend asked him to help him leave. “We had already talked about it, I had promised him, but it was very hard for me to hear.” A nurse heard about the project. The case was taken up to the Bordeaux public prosecutor’s office. “A prosecutor called me. He told me that his wife had died of Charcot and that he dreamed of a doctor relieving her suffering. But he warned me that he couldn’t protect me if I went through with it.”
The patient’s agony worsened for three weeks. “Patrice had stopped all his treatments, he was feverish, flies were landing on his bedsores, it stank, it was terrible”, describes his friend. One night in November 2010, Antoine Mesnier finally broke down. Having left to attend a match of the XV of France in Paris, he returned by the first train, went to the Lestages and, with their agreement, took action.
“I took the machine and unplugged Patrice.”
Antoine Mesnier, former doctorat franceinfo
“Antoine was exceptional with Patrice, as a doctor and friend. He accompanied him until the end”, greets, 13 years later, the widow of the former defender, Annick Oleksiak. The doctor never regretted his action. But he had difficulty digesting it. “I couldn’t bear to have done that. I was filled with the Judeo-Christian conviction that I had no right to kill someone. But it was an act of love! I I helped a friend die. It took me a year and a half of therapy to get over it.”
By revealing his secret, Antoine Mesnier knows he is taking a risk. In criminal matters, the limitation period is twenty years. It runs, in his case, until 2030. “Am I exposing myself to a lawsuit?I would like to go to the meetings, he blurted. I am already condemned by illness. Prison doesn’t scare me.”
“Perhaps my trial would even become a turning point in changing the law.”
Antoine Mesnierat franceinfo
Change the law. The obsession does not come from him, but from Serge Simon, his best friend, whom others knew as an international rugby player, TV and radio consultant, or even vice-president of the French Rugby Federation. It was to him that Antoine Mesnier first announced his illness. It was to him that the doctor opened his door, a few days later, when he had cut himself off from the world and abandoned himself to whiskey and cigarettes. “He was furious to see me like that. He told me: ‘We’re going to give meaning to your life and mine. We’re going to bury the Claeys-Leonetti law, we’re going to invent the Simon-Mesnier law.'”
In the summer of 2022, the patient had a word with Emmanuel Macron. The exchange took place at the Stade de France, on the sidelines of the Top 14 final. Thanks to VIP places obtained by Serge Simon, he limped with his cane to the Elyseum lounge. Between two petit fours and a glass of champagne, he caught the attention of the president, freshly re-elected. “I told him that, if he wanted to go down in history, like Giscard with abortion, Mitterrand with the death penalty or Hollande with marriage for all, he needed a law on the end of life. He took my number and, the next day, one of his relatives called me to collect my testimony.”
“I finally exist”
Since the announcement of his illness, the sixty-year-old feels “relive”. Climbing stairs exhausts him, supporting his head is a struggle and opening a tube of toothpaste is impossible for him, but he takes time for himself and is enriched by each new encounter. “I finally exist, I who missed out on my life, offered to others, to the sick, 14 hours a day.” Having left to isolate himself in the heights of the Basque Country, he has the impression of “stabilize” his pathology. Better oxygenated, his blood cleared up. “My neurologist doesn’t understand how I can still walk”he assures.
His hope – quickly disappointed – of benefiting from an experimental treatment one day led him to Paris. A documentary project on his fight also took him to the capital, where he crossed paths with the journalist and doctor Marina Carrère d’Encausse, who had become a close friend. She speaks of him as a “companion”mentions to him “a filial love”. Their meeting gave birth to the film End of life: so you have a choicebroadcast on October 11 on France 2.
“Charcot kills me and makes me reborn. I began to live when I knew I was condemned.”
Antoine Mesnier, former doctorat franceinfo
Knowing the countdown was on, the blue-eyed patient went to settle some scores with life. He returned to the places of his youth and to the traces of a rape inflicted by a pedophile priest at the age of 13, the existence of which he revealed. “This burden destroyed my life. I became a sad clown, who makes all his patients laugh in the waiting room, but who cries at night.” This hypersensitive person, forced by illness to abandon his office, still experiences sleepless nights. He thinks and sometimes convinces himself that he was punished for having shortened the suffering of Patrice Lestage.
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Like the latter, Antoine Mesnier “ask [s]we round” to a doctor friend to help him leave. This friend, this brother, is Serge Simon. “It is you that I choose to send me to the stars when I am at the end, at the moment when I will no longer be able to scratch”he told her, the day of the diagnosis. “He cried and hugged me and told me he would be there.” Since then, this guarantee of not experiencing the “nightmare” by Patrice Lestage brings him “serenity”.
He also feels that his last fight is about to be won. In the spring, the head of state promised a bill on end of life. The text must be presented to the Council of Ministers in December, then examined in Parliament in 2024. At Antoine Mesnier, the lethal products are already ready. It remains to wait for the green light from the law, to “don’t send Serge to prison”.