2023-05-27 05:00:00
We played squash together for a long time. Then one day he said to me:I have a heart murmur. I have to stop the matches, it’s too violent for me“. We are at the beginning of the nineties. Olivier Blin is press attaché at the Théâtre de Poche, in the Bois de la Cambre, in Brussels. I find him once more during a play, then another… We we were in college together.
The years go by. Olivier takes over the management of Le Poche in early 2016. He tells me that his heart problems have worsened. He has been living with a pacemaker for several years. Worse. Here he is on the list of patients awaiting a heart transplant… We are at the beginning of 2020 and the Covid is coming.
“It is estimated that I am at 40% of the average capacity of a man of my age, i.e. 55 years old“, he told me that day. A few months later, Olivier will have a heart attack. The ambulance, the hospital… then a second heart attack at the Saint-Luc university clinics.
This time, he no longer has a choice. He’s going to have to live with a “heartmate“until the transplant. It’s a pump, an assistance that will help his heart to beat at a constant rate. Because he has become even more fragile. So for more than a year, he will live with a cable that enters his belly, and which connects his heart to external batteries. “I can’t part with this bag, except at night, when I’m plugged into the mains with this sort of Marsupilami tail” he said.
1685171471
#Open #heart #story #heart #transplant
