“It’s an alphabetshe explains. The alphabet of my handicap. It goes from A to Z. I want to tell him what an accident really is.”
Gaëlle is 34 years old and moves around today using a rollator or a wheelchair. She has lost her balance and can no longer walk on her own. She suffers from chronic pain and has to wear a splint to help lift her foot because her brain is no longer sending the right signal. “My life is a fight“she summarizes.
10 years ago, a drunk driver crashed into the car where Gaëlle was standing with her stationary companion. They are catapulted onto a railway line 15 meters below. After three weeks in a coma, she spent a year and a half in hospital. Then aged 24, she had to relearn everything: to breathe, to swallow her saliva, to go to the toilet. “I celebrated my 25th birthday in a diaper. I mightn’t stay like this, I had to move on“she tells us.
Today, she is fighting to assert her rights as a disabled person. For her, the correct definition is not “person with reduced mobility”, but “with mobility reinvented” : “You have to reinvent everything, plan everything when you are disabled. We are in 2022, and almost nothing is adapted“laments the young woman.
With her book, she hopes to raise awareness of the dangers of drunk driving. “I love having a drink, but never before drivingshe insists. If I can prevent at least one person driving dead drunk, then I haven’t lost everything.”