Yes, but now, five years later, in June 2021, it’s a whole…
Yes, but now, five years later, in June 2021, it is a completely different diagnosis that falls. Breast cancer. Gilles Mercadal falls from his chair. “Yet I was warned,” he breathes. In a way yes: in the family, the grandmother has multiplied breast cancers, the mother too. “She told me regarding the risk factor. I thought of my sister, my daughters, but I didn’t feel concerned, ”confides this SVT teacher in a college in Dax. He didn’t think regarding it any more, even when he felt “a small lump in the pectoral”. It’s a modification of the areola that convinces Gilles to show it to the doctor.
The father of the Landes family during his treatment. Very present on social networks, he does not hesitate to share his story, “to circulate information”.
GILLES MERCADAL
“I didn’t hit”
And There you go. Breast cancer, then. “My mother had alerted me, but I did not strike. To have breast cancer, you still have to consider that you have breasts. »
“My mother had alerted me, but I did not strike. To have breast cancer, you still have to consider that you have breasts.
And this is only the beginning of this dark irony. In fact, the course of care intervenes in an ultra-feminine universe, pink, even in the name of these services of surgery of the woman. No time to think, Gilles went through a series of examinations: mammography, MRI, removal of the tumour, the mammary gland and the sentinel lymph nodes. There is also hormone therapy, chemotherapy, radiotherapy. And finally, comprehensive genetic testing. “Still, it had to fall on me,” he smiles.
“Given the family pattern, shouldn’t I have received a letter from the CPAM or the doctor asking me to be tested? »
Since then, he has reflected. Gilles Mercadal says to himself that “it’s a disease like any other, it’s the image of the breast which, wrongly, is sexualized. Finally, it suits me well to make the link between Pink October and Movember”. He’s also a bit angry at the lack of official information. “Given the family pattern, shouldn’t I have received a letter from the CPAM or the doctor asking me to be tested? »
Gilles Marcadal in his privileged family environment: in Angoumé, surrounded by nature. Note his “conatus” sweatshirt, witness to his readings of Spinoza.
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Today, Gilles is fine. Under his T-shirt a large scar crosses his chest. Far from him the idea of a surgical reconstruction or a tattoo. It’s his story.
“I am no longer the same man”
And then, this cancer changed all the landmarks of this “scientist, Cartesian, used to handling atoms and matter”. There, faced with death, everything exploded. “A chance”, he says with the awareness that the sentence can shock. “Lucky,” he repeats, stroking the cat Baghera, whom he had never really looked at before spending whole months at home. “This ordeal has opened up new perspectives on life for me, my whole reading grid has changed. »
Once the anguish of death had been overcome, Gilles Mercadal indeed wanted to understand: why the disease? So, if he accepts the treatments without flinching, he also opens the door to alternative therapies and surrounds himself with an “army of magicians”: a sophrologist, a socio-esthetician, a magnetizer, an emotional detox specialist, a dietician, arts therapists (singing, dancing.)
And then he opens up to spirituality, Taoism, psychogenealogy, experiments with Toltec agreements, reads Spinoza, adheres to the “present moment”, believes in synchronicities. He also takes the time to breathe, to meditate at the foot of the 600-year-old Nerthe oak tree in Magescq, practices cardiac coherence and savors the privileged environment that surrounds him: the meadows where donkeys and hair frolic, the view of the Pyrenees. “I am no longer the same man at all,” he agrees. “This transformation is surely the best gift I might give to my daughters, Louise and Zoé: to show them that it is magical and beautiful to be reborn following a tragedy. »
