Jean-Luc Souflet, 77

On August 3, 2018, shortly before sunset, in the heart of Namibia's wide and grandiose plains, in the evening of the slow and wonderful ascent of the Sossusvlei dune, Françoise, my wife, died. She fell silently, overcome by a heart attack, just a few metres from me, who didn't even see her collapse.
How I wish it had been her, like Florence, who could testify to having escaped! Tragically, there is the one who leaves suddenly, without a farewell, walled in by the combined silences of death and the desert. And then there's the one who remains, stunned by the violence, shattered by the chaos of absence. After 50 years together, I find myself brutally cut off from half of us. To match the love I've experienced, I have to embark on a long journey of reconstruction. Years and years. And hope to achieve the appeasement that never erases intimate suffering. I had to overcome denial, deal with guilt, tame the pain, extract myself from the other planet, the one inaccessible to those who have not crossed the ordeal, and with determination, cling on to the world of the living. It's a slow, winding road that touches the heart, the body, the mind and the soul! I have no particular medical knowledge, but I'm sure this cataclysm could have been avoided.
Because Françoise was very attentive to her health... but we didn't know. We didn't know the specific symptoms of a woman's heart attack. Medicine itself had not yet fully taken on board the cry launched by Claire Mounier in her book Mon combat pour le cœur des femmes. A document I unfortunately discovered too late. But I wanted to meet her and thank her. I wanted to say thank you, and to do so in the face of a paradox: the relief of knowing, and the rage of not having known beforehand, and thus of having been able to detect warnings that were only recognized after the fact. Thank you, Claire, for fighting this battle and making it accessible to the general public. Thank you Claire, thank you Thierry for your tenacious commitment. It gave birth to the Bus du Coeur. It's a magnificent, practical tool for raising awareness and screening, a work that brings together so many energies and to which I subscribe.
So, ladies, don't ignore the warning signs, and don't put off going for screening. It can save your life.
So, men, husbands, partners, sons, brothers and friends, let's be attentive to the weak signals felt by the women close to us, and encourage them to take the plunge.
As Claire likes to say, let's all be hummingbirds for these messages of life.

Sophie, 47 years old

Business executive in Lyon

During lockdown, I was experiencing strange sensations. I called the paramedics right away and described what I was feeling. They told me I was having a heart attack. Fortunately, I was taken to the hospital right away and had two stents inserted. I was released after four days and started cardiac [...]

Virginie, 64 years old

Nurse from Paris, France

“I hadn’t been feeling very well for several months. My leg hurt when I walked and I coughed a lot. I talked with my doctor who sent me to the hospital for a full battery of tests. At that time, I was still smoking around 20 cigarettes a day. I had been taking anti-depressants since I had my [...]

Elizabeth, 46 ans

E-commerce customer relations manager (Gruissan)

This week, I'm celebrating the third anniversary of my "heart story", and it's a good time to talk about it because yes, really, it's quite a story! Everything changed for me at the age of 43, on June 2, 2019. That Sunday, I literally ended up out of breath in the emergency room of the [...]