“We organized everything with my wife and my children. I don’t want to be plugged into a machine to breathe when there is nothing left, no future. I don’t want to suffer and above all make my family suffer. (…) I registered in Switzerland for assisted suicide, all the papers are signed”, he confides.
“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 (where he lives, editor’s note). When you are handed the stamp by telling you that two minutes later, you will be dead, it’s not that simple. But in any case, everything is ready”, he develops, a few days after President Macron announced a bill on the end of life “by the end of the summer”.
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’m there,” he says. “Then you move on to the first category neck stages with the difficulty, even the impossibility, of swallowing (…) The next stage is the attack of 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 was diagnosed, “the disease took a long time to become apparent”.
“To keep my spirits up, I need sport. The day when I can no longer ride a bike, it will go very quickly,” he says.
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.