2023-10-28 02:30:09
“In the morning he ran; in the evening, he was intubated”, summarizes Paule (the first names of the family members have been changed). THE Sunday June 9, 2019, his son Castille, then 7 years old, returned from his visit to the museum with a cough that prevented him from breathing. In the evening, Olivier, his father, took him to the emergency room where he was diagnosed with laryngeal syndrome. ” He is watching The little Prince. We’ll be back in an hour.”he wrote to his wife. “The vital prognosis is engaged”, announces another of his text messages sent at dawn. Castile is in septic shock, the infection caused by Staphylococcus aureus is widespread.
Sitting in a corner of a room at the Robert-Debré hospital (Assistance publique-Hôpitaux de Paris, AP-HP), in Paris 19ePaule looks at her boy, connected by cables to the machines that beep, to the screens that display numbers in blue, pink, green, and these doctors treating her son, a “on strike” sign on their back. “Why are you doing this to me?” », Castile stuttered before having to swallow the intubation tube connected to the respirator. His last sentence, before months of silence. Plunged into an artificial coma, the little boy was close to death for three and a half months. Four years later, he is doing well but “the sheave is a wound that opens when you look at it”, confides Paule.
Every year, 16,000 children are hospitalized in the forty French pediatric intensive care units. Respiratory or visceral failure, multiple trauma, patients are in vital danger. Some 3% of them die. “It is the antechamber of death where the worst of atrocities and the greatest of humanity coexist”, analyzes Paule. In the stories, mixed with pain is the discovery of an unsuspected link with the medical profession. “In this resuscitation bubble, caregivers and parents share a very strong intimacy, on the borders of what makes up existence”assures Gaëlle Le Ficher, psychologist in the intensive care unit of the Necker-Enfants Malades hospital (AP-HP), in Paris 15e. Three families agreed to tell us regarding this shock, the bonds formed, and life followingward. Those of Castille, Elias and Nao, hospitalized in Trousseau (AP-HP), in Paris 12e.
Accepting the “unacceptable”
Pauline Lavaud, 33 years old today, shows a photo. It is January 2020. We see her looking tired, her eyes a little bright, she has just given birth; At his side, resuscitator Isabelle Guellec, blue blouse, wide smile, holds the newborn, Noé, in her arms. Fifteen months before this photo, the 44-year-old doctor was carrying another baby, Elias. This October 14, 2018, Pauline Lavaud and her companion Saïd Benmouffok, seven years her senior, were projected into this universe where death lurks. After an emergency cesarean section, the medical team suspected a lack of oxygen and transferred Elias to neonatal intensive care in order to lower his body temperature and thus limit brain damage.
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