“So Mr. G., it’s over!” “ : Doctor Nathalie de Soultrait walks slowly and in a soft voice addresses the deceased: “Mr. G., we are going to take your pacemaker away from you. “ She walks around the bed, walks over and repeats: “Mr. G. We are going to take your pacemaker off. “ The semi-dark bedroom is decorated with a white orchid and a red bromeliad. She goes out. The door will remain ajar. The body will not be hidden from view of visitors or patients passing through the hallway. They will see her face soothed by the light of a white candle.
Death is not hidden in the palliative care unit of the Rives-de-Seine hospital center in Puteaux (Hauts-de-Seine). “We don’t fight it. We don’t run away from it either. It is considered to be a natural process that is part of life ”, says Ségolène Perruchio, head of this twelve-bed service where 250 patients enter each year and only one in five comes out alive. Two hundred die there, or two deaths every three days.
Here, the enemy is not death but pain. With terminal cancer, with an incurable disease, many patients require doses of morphine that would make most hospital departments shudder. Despite the arsenal of narcotics at its disposal, vsevery caregiver on the ward has heard at least once in the mouth of a patient: “I want you to help me leave. ” “The request is made, observes Marie Simian, psychologist in the unit. But, for the vast majority of patients, it disappears as soon as the pain subsides. “
Etienne Prache, volunteer with the Little Brothers of the Poor, has been collecting the confidences of the patients of the place for twenty years : “If there is no more physical suffering, the request for euthanasia stops”, confirms this retired advertiser. “You know the unit is a five-star palliative care unit, he exclaims. Here, the sick are cocooned, pampered, surrounded. They feel safe. As soon as they are no longer in pain, they become like you and me, and even happy sometimes! ”
Psychic suffering
Ségolène Perruchio recognizes that“A tiny minority persist in asking for euthanasia”. Most often, these are patients who cannot stand the idea of their body’s downfall. Some suffer from Charcot’s disease, others from cancer. “But as soon as we tell them that we are not going to kill them, that the law prohibits it, our response paradoxically provokes a resurgence of desire to live in some”, she observes.
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