Suffering from Charcot’s disease, the sports journalist figure of Canal + Charles Biétry, 79, tells the daily “L’Equipe” this weekend that he organized his assisted suicide in Switzerland.
Assisted suicide in Switzerland where it is legal. Suffering from Charcot’s disease, an incurable pathology, the sports journalist, Canal + figure of the 80s and 90s Charles Biétry, 79, tells this weekend on a daily basis The team planning for his end of life. “We organized everything with my wife and my children. I don’t want to be hooked up to a machine to breathe when there’s nothing left, no future. I don’t want to suffer and especially to make my family suffer […] I registered in Switzerland for assisted suicide, all the papers are signed,” he indicates. Confidences published a few days after President Macron announced a bill on the end of life “by the end of the summer”.
“You have to take the last pill yourself. This gesture, it’s easy to say “I’m going to do it” when I’m at the seaside in Carnac [où il vit, ndlr]. When someone hands you the pill and tells you that two minutes later you’ll be dead, it’s not that simple. But in any case, everything is ready.” develops the one which was nicknamed “the Menhir” because of its Breton origins, or because it appeared solid like granite when he was sports director of Canal.
In this long interview, the former sports journalist recounts the progression of his disease, which is characterized by progressive paralysis of the muscles, and a life expectancy not exceeding three to five years, once the diagnosis has been made. “The stages, I know them: lower limb, upper limb, throat and larynx… I am there”, he declares. “Then you go to the first category col stages with the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of swallowing […] The next step is attacking the lungs. […] When it doesn’t work anymore, I want to stop.”
Charles Biétry also recounts his sports routine which he continues against the advice of his doctors and which, he believes, allowed him to resist the disease for a while. “As I was doing everything to rebuild muscles that were leaving” before the disease is diagnosed, “the disease took a long time to catch on”. “To keep my spirits up, I need sport. The day when I can no longer ride a bike, it will go very quickly,” he advances.
Charles Biétry has marked the world of sport and the media over the past 50 years, having revolutionized the relationship between football and television. He is also the author of a scoop on the deaths of the Munich Olympics on September 6, 1972, when he was a reporter for AFP.
