Par
Valentin Mauduit
Published on
Oct 13, 2024 at 5:36 p.m.
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One mild autumn afternoon, Lucie Olivier, 46, finds her home decorated like a real cocoon. We find the touch of the interior decorator. She sits in her kitchen, a flask full of tea…
For an hour and a half, the resident of Bouloire (Sarthe) looks back on the breast cancer that affected her husband, Carlos, the many trials that this causes, the impacts on life afterward.
Her husband died after breast cancer… despite being treated
Today, the ordeal is still painful, but Lucie is doing better. “A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to. »
Three years after the death of her husband, a painter and caregiver for children with academic difficulties, she confides: “it’s another pain “. Right at the heart of the national campaign to fight against breast cancer, Pink October, it reminds everyone of the importance of feeling their chest!
It all started from a cyst
In 2014, Carlos and Lucie have been a couple for a few months. The innocence of a budding love is quickly swept away by this cyst on the chest.
He wasn’t worried about it that much, it wasn’t painful at all, and it didn’t bother him.
She still convinces him to contact his general practitioner. A scanner detects nothing, then a biopsy… The ax falls. “Fifteen days before Noëlwe are diagnosed with breast cancer. » Lucie and Carlos find it hard to believe it. “It affects 1% of the world’s population. What a world! » she insists.
Everything collapses for the young couple. “And while he hadn’t had any pain until now, now that the word is out the pain is coming. »The brain is crazy!
The meetings follow one another. “We are going to see a gynecologistyou don’t understand anything she’s saying. You’re in the fog, it’s completely methodical, and not educational. »
“A part of denial”
On the other hand, they understood it well, “it’s a cancer, and the word must already be accepted”. Carlos is not going through the same ordeal as Lucie at this time. “He was a taciturn person when it came to analysis. He was completely detached from that. There was a part of denial Also. »
Every week meetings with doctors. “When we saw the medical professionals, Carlos was extremely reassured. He had great confidence in them. For him, his healing would not go through the mind, but through the doctors. »
Friends left behind
Lucie then tries to motivate the man who will become her husband to go out, to simply get up. Seven months of treatment where the side effects Chemotherapy and radiation hurt everyone.
“His body changes, the senses are completely lost. He no longer had any taste, he had a iron taste permanently in the mouth. There are emotional elevators for him and for me. »
And above all fatigue… “Life also changes, because when friends invite us to eat unexpectedly, no, in fact, we can no longer come because Carlos cannot get up. Then, the dinners space out, space out, until they no longer exist. People didn’t accept that he was tired. »
Finding your place as a caregiver
And the role of support in these moments is complicated. You have to find your place. An entrepreneur, Lucie must also continue her activity.
No one ever asks you how you are. You don’t have the right to say anything, because you are not sick.
Today, she talks a lot with other carers about this role. Letting a few tears escape while writing the messages. “But writing makes me feel so good. I am also very spiritual. »
She praises the work of nurses
These long months of treatment take place in the hospital. “You feel like you’re living there during that time.” » But she salutes “the profession of nurses in the clinique Victor-Hugo. They are angels, I don’t know where they get their strength. They are armored with kindness.” Bombs of humanity that Lucie will never forget.
Breast removal
With misty eyes, she grabs her flask of tea to warm her hands and her soul. Without ever dipping your lips into it.
In July, healing comes. An ablation of the breast, and the treatment works, the cancer cells have disappeared.
“For five years after remission, he had a hormonal treatment to take every day. » The family goes on vacation – they have two children, one each, from previous relationships – to finally have a good time.
“Accept looks”
Far from hospitals, far from bad news. But the stigma of this damn cancer is there. “We were getting ready to go to the swimming pool, and then he said to me ‘I’m going to have to take off my t-shirt’.
This scar (she mimes on his chest, she went from here, under the armpit, to here, at the chest), I no longer saw her, she was so much a part of him. This is where we also realize the physical and psychological damage. He made the choice to go alone, without anyone. Then, he managed to accept this look, because there are looks! »
Covid postpones the meeting
Hormonal treatment was installed, life resumed as best it could. Every year, a check-up meeting threatens this new found everyday life. “You’re going, but with a sword of Damocles. » The tea is still getting cold, but let’s move on…
Five years of treatment, routine check-up is approaching. We are in 2020, Covid is devastating the French hospital environment. Carlos hadn’t scheduled his meeting… he’s not a priority. So he will wait. In the meantime, his basic treatment ends.
But at the start of 2021, pain reappeared.
He no longer ate and suffered enormous stomach pain.
It is in Paris that the hospital suite takes place. “We went back and forth I don’t know how many times…”
A new MRI. Followed by a call from the oncologist Le Mans which had received the results. “She tells us, I want you to be there in an hour… I tell myself that this is to quickly put the treatment in place…”
Stomach and liver cancer
Except that it’s already too late, stomach cancer has ravaged Carlos’ insides, before eating away at his liver. “We learned all this, I’m madly angry. It comes back, it’s gone again… And there, Carlos looks at me, and says ‘it’s going to be okay’. »
In his gut, however, he knows that the worst awaits him. “He wrote a lot. When he died, I found lettresand he understood very quickly that his body would not hold up. »
A hospital wedding
The ordeal resumes, the suffering with it… The couple reflects and makes an important decision: marriage. “We talked about it to the oncologist, and there she said to me ‘unfortunately, I don’t think he will ever leave the hospital, we have to do it as quickly as possible’. So we got married at the clinic urgently, with a notary and an elected official. »
She thinks back to this “tragicomic” situationin his words. “With the drugs and the morphine, he became a child again, he was in a kind of parallel world… Except that there, the marriage, the situation was serious. » It is therefore in a hospital room that the two lovers say “yes” to each other.
He died on July 24, 2021
The rest, a long descent into hell.
Either way, you know the ending. I knew, he told me, I signed a release… He didn’t want to be kept, connected everywhere…
It was then that Carlos’ family, of Portuguese origin, came to live in the hospital room. “They had a bed. This figure of the parents was reassuring. »
On Saturday July 24, 2021, the inevitable happened, Carlos passed away at the age of 44, after a clear return to form a few days earlier.
“Disconnected from reality”
A fog settles in at Lucie’s house. “We lose all lucidity,” she admits. Autopilot mode is activated. “I’m going to see him at the funeral home, I’m slipping tons of letters into his suit… The coffin goes down into the earth, I don’t understand anything. We are disconnected from reality. »
His relationship to death
After having encountered illness and death so closely, Lucie Olivier changed her relationship with death. The forty-year-old assures “no longer to be afraid of it. When it’s you who leads the way until the end, your vision changes.”
For her, and for those around her. “Before Carlos died, my parents were immortal,” she says. We also had to talk about it to the children, to their loved ones… “I always told the children, death is not taboo. Do you want to talk about it? » Sometimes still, scraps of discussion arise on this subject. “Are you okay?” Are you thinking of Carlos? Do you want to talk about it? Even if they don’t want to talk about it, it doesn’t matter, the seed is planted for next time. »
Talking about the progression of the illness to loved ones was also quite an ordeal. “During the meetings, I wrote everything down. Once on the phone, I didn’t want to embellish something to seem less serious. I learned to say the words. Likewise, I had asked the oncologist for an appointment with Carlos’ parents, so that they could ask all the questions they had. »
Today, she takes “things philosophically. Anger is useless.” Lucie goes to the cemetery “once a week, before it was three or four… And I insist, the cemetery is not an obligatory place, I know it is there”.
Lucie delivers without taboo: “It’s not death that is complicated, it’s absence. » The forty-year-old continues: “We had rituals on Sunday evening, what do we do now? Because before all that, you say to yourself, maybe he’ll show up one evening, but no! »
“Cancer ravages everything in its path”
Life has started again, but without the person so dear to him. “In the following year, you have to contain yourself every day from morning to evening. We don’t want to talk about it. I needed to be alone, but still, I didn’t want to be forgotten. » A year of administrative procedures heavy too, almost insurmountable.
For our telephone operator, I still receive invoices in his name, even though I had to send ten death notices…
Lucie’s observation is simple. Even cold: “Cancer ravages everything in its path, those around you, your vision of life. » Before tempering, “but it illuminates so many other things”.
Grieving is complicated, “I’m not trying to rebuild my life. I’m going to build it. However, when all this happens, we wonder how we are going to put one foot in front of the other every morning.”
The tea level has not gone down a milliliter, it is cold. But the heart de Lucie is hot.
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