The Great Unpacking Of Love
Part 1

To my little rats…

To their Dad

To you Lucie

Prelude

Joséphine, Clara, Adèle.

Three women who each tell their story through a slice of their life. Slice of life marked by suffering which they each try to take advantage of in their own way.

Alone, they can do nothing against the blows of fate. Everyone will discover the immense power of kindness, empathy, and humanity. The saving power of humans at their most beautiful.

What if Joséphine, Clara and Adèle were one?

One and the same woman hit hard by an illness with explosive and devastating collateral effects.

One and the same person condemned to suffer the unacceptable.

One and the same person who refuses to be defeated and discovers a major ally: “Love in three dimensions”.

Act 1

Leukemia darling

May 2010, cancer rudely invites itself into my life without warning. What insolence all the same! What a lack of good manners!

Involuntarily, he takes me into a meeting of the 3rd type and catapults me, despite myself, into a surreal world worthy of the best Magritte.

The diagnosis falls like a stone: “Acute lymphoblastic leukemia”. My first thought goes straight to the Grim Reaper.

What follows is a whirlwind, a storm, a hurricane in my head. My neurons, my ideas collide, shaken in all directions like when, as a child, I eagerly shook the glass ball brought back from an excursion, to see the snow swirl. No screenwriter will ever be able to match the imagination and violence of cancer.

Without really having time to catch my breath, here I am embarked on the Medical Planet.

I enter a true microcosm, a sort of anthill where time seems to have stopped, cut off from the outside world. I feel like I’m entering a submarine. My room will become my survival vessel. I watch totally helpless and in total submission to the ballet of the nurse ants. In no time, these transformed me into a veritable octopus with multiple plastic tentacles, connected to a string of pouches filled with a so-called miracle cure, more commonly called: “Chemo”. Ah, chemotherapy! Who has never heard of it? Who does not have an acquaintance who has received it? But who really knows the side effects of this major advance in cancer treatment? At least, not me. I am far from imagining what I will experience. I discover that chemo is a real Terminator that devastates everything in its path, starting with my morale. My cancer cells are literally bombarded, exterminated. The other side of the coin is that my healthy cells are too. I feel like a no man’s land inside. I am sailing on rough seas that make me nauseous. Food disgusts me and my scales are spiraling downward. The only good news is that I am in remission from the first treatment.

In my sanitized room, waking up is painful, I have no desire to get out of bed and I dread the nurse coming in with my breakfast. Why should I get up? I have no purpose for the day and I am doomed to stay indoors. In my submarine, seconds seem like minutes, minutes seem like hours and what can we say about a day, indefinitely long, long, long. Very quickly, I realize that I am not ready to leave my submarine. I will have to learn patience, to live day by day behind closed doors to avoid any germs.

Inexorably, my life is suspended and punctuated by the level of my red b***d cells, white b***d cells, neutrophils, platelets but also by the countless x-rays, scanners, pet-scans, MRIs, ultrasounds… I am also nicknamed Miss Chernobyl!

The news of my leukemia spread like wildfire, much to the dismay of my family who thought they could keep it an open secret. To my great astonishment, I discovered that my cancer often makes people uncomfortable, they don’t know how to react. Whatever anyone says, cancer still remains taboo. For me, the simplest thing is for them to remain themselves, to be true and to approach me with all simplicity even if I saw some come out of my room in tears.

Those who help me the most are those who talk to me about everything and nothing, about life outside and who manage to make me laugh. These make me forget for a few hours, the quagmire in which I find myself. My real friends are those who brave their fear to come see me, the walking skeleton straight out of the worst horror movie. Some prefer to write to me, send me flowers, give me books or call me. Some will become a second family for my children where they will try to forget the hospital a little. Others abstain. I respect everyone’s choice without any judgment. For sure, my illness leaves no one indifferent, it is clear that a large number of them project themselves into my own story. It could be theirs. Indeed, I am still young and my two children are fragile chicks, far from being able to leave their cozy nest.