2023-06-28 14:00:00
It is an intimate and powerful testimony. In the podcast My life with cancer, the journalist Clémentine Vergnaud tells, in ten episodes, the life of a young woman of 29 years and the outbreak of the disease. A rare and very aggressive bile duct cancer, cholangiocarcinoma, diagnosed a year ago. “It’s the lottery of chance, it’s absurd, and I’m forced to accept it. Between hopes, support from loved ones, treatments and relationship to death, Clémentine Vergnaud delivers a sensitive and salutary story. For Pointshe looks back on the past year and talks regarding an approach that she wants to be “useful to everyone”.
Point : Why did you want to testify regarding your cancer?
Clementine Vergnaud: I first testified to be useful, and to try to allow those who would listen to me to better tame this disease. Because this podcast is intended to speak to everyone: to patients (who may feel alone in the ordeal), to their loved ones and caregivers (who do not always understand what is going on in the heads of the first), but also to everyone. Almost all of us know, today, in our entourage a person with cancer (a relative, a colleague, etc.). This disease is spreading and becoming a major issue. I am well aware that going to this subject, still taboo, requires an effort, but it is important to talk regarding it, to make it visible. I have also received hundreds of messages since the broadcast of my testimony. Some confide in me that they feel “understood”, others forward it to relatives…
I also testified for myself. And my approach is quite primitive, almost animal: I needed to leave a mark. I’m 30, my professional career is just getting started, I don’t have any children… If I’m going to die in three months, what will people say when people talk regarding me? Certainly, my relatives will be able to tell who I was. But, for the others, I didn’t want to leave without leaving a legacy.
Your podcast starts with this day of June 15, 2022, during which you understand that “there is something wrong”…
It’s very hot, I’m wearing a light dress and I’m regarding to have a CT scan for what I believe to be gallstones. If the exams seem long enough to me, the wait is even longer. I realize that in the waiting room patients who have passed following me are called before me. And I hate to hear the radiologist give them their report, the door wide open. I then find that it is a scandalous violation of medical secrecy. However, when they call me, they close the door behind me. And I have a rush of adrenaline, I understand that there is something wrong.
The doctor tells me that I have a liver mass of 6 x 4 cm and that I will have to do additional tests. There is a kind of urgency in his voice and he tells me that he doesn’t want “there to be any loss of chance”. I take a punch. “Loss of luck” is for the people who will go through it! I ask him if it might be cancer, he confirms it, and then everything falls apart. I go out haggard, in a trance. I feel alone in the world, I am separated, my parents are 400 km away. I put the report on a yellow recycling bin and call my mother, a nurse, who replies: “Listen, at this age, I’ve never seen cancer. »
How do you welcome this announcement when you are 29 years old?
We cannot imagine it. Especially since at that time I was fine, exercised, ate organic, didn’t smoke… It was the lottery of chance, it was absurd, and I was forced to accept it. Nevertheless, I feel a great sense of injustice, and ask myself “why me? “. As I say in the episode “I’m not like those little girls anymore”, I watch on Instagram my friends go on vacation in idyllic places while I’m hooked up to my chemo pumps, getting pregnant when I can’t first never have a baby, and see colleagues seize the professional opportunities I longed for… Cancer patients are not angelic [elle rit]they feel the same feelings as everyone else, and at that moment, I am jealous.
You mention in your podcast how illness changes the relationship with others, and list their clumsiness in particular… Are there things not to say to a sick person?
It’s very simple, but I think it’s enough to tell the other that we are there, that we love them and that, if they need something, then they can call us. According to the messages I receive, it was important to say it. Someone wrote to me: “Thanks to you, I knew what to say to this friend I was having dinner with and seeing for the first time since the announcement of her cancer. »
In my case, I’ve been told a lot “you’re a fighter”, “you’ll get out of it”… I find these injunctions to force terrible. When I was told “don’t give up, fight”, I wanted to answer: “Take my place, we’ll talk regarding it once more! I know that these words are benevolent, but the others, who see themselves in you as in a mirror, tend to send back their own fears. And, little by little, I started to answer that I was not a “warrior”, that I was simply doing “whatever I might”. I also announced that no, I was not curable, and that was a form of deliverance.
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You talk regarding “holding out” for eight months without trying to find out the prognosis of your cancer, then, one evening, you go on the Internet. What has this information changed for you?
It’s a winter Sunday night. I have dinner with my spouse and, at the end of the meal, I feel so bad that I end up on the floor. I decide to go to bed but continue to squirm. The period is difficult, I chain complications and hospitalizations. Psychologically, I feel a huge fed up and I come to wonder what’s the use of suffering. Am I doing all this for nothing? I need to know. From the few elements shared by the oncologists and the over-solicitation of my parents and my spouse, I had understood that it was not “little cancer”. But how much? So, I’m doing my research: 7 to 10% five-year survival, when you’re operable, and I’m not. But it was important for me to know that and to go through this stage. I needed to know how close death and I were to face it better. It also allowed me to raise the issue with my oncologists, who I somehow forced to answer me when they had so far been dodging…
Administrative hassles are a second violence when you are sick.
You devote an episode to the heaviness of the administrative work which is added to the illness, more specifically to your problems with social security. Tell us…
Since the beginning of the illness, a “bug” on their site has prevented me from automatically receiving the daily allowances to which I am entitled. I have to log in every fortnight to claim them and the settlement takes two weeks, if not more. It’s such a mental load that I reported it by email and was even received by the CPAM. I was told that nothing might be done, I cried!
However, a few days following the broadcast of my podcast, the President and CEO of Radio France picked up her phone herself and, this Thursday evening, I received an email indicating that an investigation was to be carried out, that the “bug” was going to be resolved and that it actually affected hundreds of other people. I’m almost a whistleblower [elle rit]. I had a microphone and was able to give them “bad publicity”, but when I think of all those who have seen each other in silence, it’s heartbreaking. Because the administrative galleys are a second violence when you are sick.
Where are you today?
After months of chemotherapy and immunotherapy, I am now being treated with targeted therapy, and this is an opportunity for me: my life is almost normal, I have few side effects, I can envisage a return to work and I rediscover simple pleasures like going to a party. We also see the disease reduce a little, it is a possibility that we might not even consider since we only thought we might stop it. Maybe it will allow me to be stabilized long enough for research to uncover something groundbreaking that can save me. It’s the optics with patients who, like me, cannot be cured.
As for my professional projects, I can confirm that a second season of my podcast is in the works. It’s a lot of pressure when I see the number of testimonials I received for the premiere!
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“My life facing cancer: Clémentine’s diary”, by Samuel Aslanoff and Clémentine Vergnaud, on France Info.
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