2024-09-22 04:30:07
Luna Rabarot, at home, in Saint-Quentin-sur-Isère (Isère), September 16, 2024. GUILLAUME NEDELLEC FOR “LE MONDE”
Luna Rabarot remembers with horror the absence of her husband during her treatment. Already suffering from ulcerative colitis, this resident of Saint-Quentin-sur-Isère (Isère), now 28 years old, learned that she had stage 2 breast cancer in July 2022. When she was diagnosed with the disease, her husband kept his distance, did not accompany her to medical appointments, was regularly away from home and rarely asked his wife about her state of health. Indulgent, she initially thought that he needed time. “I thought he was protecting himself, that he was just scared. I didn’t realize that a caregiver had to be there throughout the whole process. He gradually detached himself.”, she says.
In January 2023, between two chemotherapies, her husband announced that he could not bear to see her sick and left her for a new partner he met at work. For Luna Rabarot, it was a real cataclysm: “I was fighting for him and our son. Before he got sick, we had planned to have another child. I was so vulnerable, I was begging him not to leave me.” She continues: “My life had no meaning anymore, I had no pillars, only cancer. This breakup is the most traumatic experience of my life.”
This defection also inspires a deep sense of injustice in her. The couple owned a house and the young woman found herself having to assume the costs of the property alone while waiting for the divorce to be pronounced more than a year later. “I was on sick leave and I didn’t have my full salary. It was hard financiallyshe confides. I had lost everything, my health, my family and soon the house, while he was living his best life with his new partner in another apartment.
Luna Rabarot’s situation is not uncommon. A study published by the journal Cancerin November 2009shows that, when faced with a cancer diagnosis, a woman is six times more likely to experience a breakup than a man in the same situation. To reach these conclusions, the researchers followed several couples in the United States for two years, one of whom had just been diagnosed. At the end of this observation, they found that the separation rate was 20.8% when the woman was ill, compared to 2.9% when the patient was the man. Another American study, published in 2015 in the Journal of Health and Social Behaviorconcludes with similar results. However, as Léonor Fasse, clinical psychologist at the Gustave-Roussy hospital in Villejuif (Val-de-Marne), points out, we must be careful: “Although the number of separations is much higher when the woman is ill, we do not always know who is behind these breakups.” We cannot therefore conclude that sick women are left more often by their partners than the other way around.
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