Despite the disease, Charles Biétry wants to keep smiling. The former journalist, who led the sports service of Canal+ and was CEO ofEurosport Franceis today suffering from Charcot’s disease. The former president of Paris Saint-Germain was diagnosed in the summer of 2022. This pathology is characterized in particular by A progressive paralysis of the muscles, and a life expectancy not exceeding three to five years.
In this context, the acolyte of Michel Denisot decided to register in Switzerland for assisted suicide, As he revealed to The team in April 2023. “We organized everything with my wife and my children. I don’t want to be connected to a machine to breathe when there is nothing left, more of the future. I don’t want to suffer and above all make my family suffer “, he confided to our colleagues.
“The words are in my head and I can’t get them out”, the overwhelming words of Charles Biétry
To tell in more detail what he is currently experiencing, and how he plans to follow, Charles Biétry will publish The last wave: Memoirs (ed. Flammarion), on January 29, 2025. On the occasion of this publication, the ex-fellow of the PAF and the sport gave an interview to Audrey Crespo-Mara, in “The portrait of the week” of Seven to eight, broadcast this Sunday, January 26, Thanks to the artificial intelligence which made it possible to reproduce his voice. He compares his symptoms to “Torture”. “The words are in my head and I cannot get them out, so we curl up and we may no longer have contact with the outside”, he said. Fortunately, he has the laughter to cross this painful test. “I am alive … I have a few weeks or months left to live. Why do you want me to spoil them and to spoil the life of my loved ones? I want to take advantage of it and do everything in my power to help research and other patients “, he explains.
-In the spring of 2024, Charles Biétry said he received “Like a gift from the sky, the project to help die ” Emmanuel Macron: “It’s already hard to die, but then to die, it is double pain,” he deplores. Suffering at the bottom of a hospital bed, muffled, no longer having the slightest exchange with those we Like and who are bad to see you hope for death while knowing that there is no way out, it’s hard. And that I can wait for death quietly, without being a ball for mine. “
“If I have a little lucidity left, I hope that we will hold hands”
If he is registered for an assisted death in Switzerland, he hopes never to make the trip. “Going suicide in Switzerland is not the dream of my end of life. The car trip with my wife and two children, the visits to unknown doctors, swallow the last cachet myself, and know that they will return to France all three with the funeral urn in the trunk … The more I think about it, the less I want. Palliative care, if there is a law, may do the trick. “ And to conclude by evoking, tears in eyes, his last moments with his loved ones: “If I have a little lucidity left, I hope that we will hold hands, that I will look at them with the sketch of a smile and that I will have the strength to tell them ‘I love you’, And it will be over. ”
