when a stroke can also lead to love at first sight

FRANCE 2 – SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 25 AT 1:15 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

It’s a beautiful novel, it’s a beautiful story… In 2015 and 2017, Louis Gustin and Elise Mathy were students. She in medicine, he in European business law. One day they were struck by a cerebrovascular accident (CVA). Elise was 27, Louis 24. On February 27, 2015, he collapsed on the terrace of a café in Warsaw (where he was on Erasmus). On February 10, 2017, she could not finish her daily run to prepare for the Paris Marathon.

Coming out of their respective long postoperative tunnels, both sought to meet other young people in the same situation as them. And met. Not on the holiday highway, as in Michel Fugain’s song, but on that of resilience. It was in a discussion group on Facebook called « young stroke survivors “. Since then, they have not left each other. “Will anyone be able to love me again?” We inevitably ask ourselves this question and in the end, when it happens to you, you realize that anything is possible.confides Elise, with a wide smile and sparkling eyes.

Another documentary on the handicapped? An umpteenth pensum on the Way of the Cross of those who claim the “right to indifference” as much as to be different? Yes and no.

Storyline in four seasons

It’s a banal everyday story told by this lovely film by Romain Potocki, with music by Vincent Delerm. Plain but bright. A slice of life marked with laughter and shouting matches, good and bad times, failures and successes…

The screenplay in four chapters, in four seasons, punctuates the ups and downs of this afterlife. His bets, his challenges, which Elise – today an endocrinologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris – and Louis, who finally won his CDI at the Ministry of Solidarity, Health and Prevention, take up day after day, where he makes his aphasia an asset in his role as disability project manager.

A life beautifully staged by the graphic animation of Yasmine Tashk, inspired by the dream that Louis had of a spider that tirelessly weaved its web, illustration, he says, of the incessant fight that he and his companion lead daily. The “13 h 15” presented by Laurent Delahousse, Sunday on France 2, is an ideal setting to convey the message ofElise and Louis, in the wake of the Sunday newspaper. Because message there is. Very quickly, the couple understood that they could not be satisfied with their beautiful story, which is nothing like a novel.

In August 2019, they embarked on a road trip around Europe, meeting other young victims of this Stroke, which strikes more than 140,000 people every year in France, 10% of whom are under 45 – the leading cause of physical disability in adults, the second leading cause of dementia (after Alzheimer’s disease) and mortality.

Their last challenge, this year: to go around Lake Geneva, by bike and on foot, after being received at the UN in Geneva. “We are not going to focus on the past but think about the future, live the present”, says Elise, who wants to believe that, “finally, life is now better than before”.

Nice irony of history: chance wanted that they are both affected by hemiparesis (paralysis on one side only), Elise on the left side, Louis on the right side. “It allows them to take each other by the hand”concludes with poetry Romain Potocki.