Things I've never dared to tell

Essalya is now a little over a year old.

Since its creation, I have talked to you about the body and its mechanisms, but I have almost never talked to you about myself.

For a long time, I wondered if my story belonged here. I had no desire to air my medical file or to build Essalya around myself.

However, it seems normal to me now that you should know where I come from, why these subjects are so important to me, and why I continue to write to you.

The reason I founded Essalya is because I experienced illness before I experienced health.

Most people actually follow the opposite trajectory.

When I was little, I appeared on television.

My parents had recorded the report on a video cassette, as was the custom at the time. I watched it with interest, without really understanding why a film crew had come to film us. It even showed my little sister climbing onto my parents' laps.

I was apparently a case of interest to the medical community.

I had a small ventricular septal defect, an opening between two chambers of the heart. It did not require surgery and the specialists were reassuring.

However, for several years they requested that I be followed by a leading professor at Necker Hospital in Paris.

We lived in the Grand Est region. My parents therefore regularly took me there by train.

These medical trips allowed me to learn very early on how to find my way around the Paris metro. Deciphering the large colored lines and understanding how to move from one to another was a lot of fun for me.

From the meeting with the professor, my parents mainly remembered this sentence:

"Everything is fine. Your child will be able to lead a normal life. However, as a precaution, they will need to be given antibiotics in case of infection."

So, at my house, antibiotics became automatic.

I took it at the slightest sign of infection. Later, it would also be prescribed to me for certain dental treatments, for my deliveries, and in various situations where it was desired to prevent an infection from spreading to the heart.

Around the age of twenty-three, I was taking them almost every two months.

The normal life that had been predicted for me was a little different from what I had imagined.

In childhood, I developed asthma, allergies, eczema, and asthmatic bronchitis.

I was a regular at the ENT clinic. He would have me try the new nasal corticosteroids that were coming onto the market.

I even remember one night when I slept in a tent in the garden because my allergies had become unbearable inside the house.

So far, nothing truly extraordinary.

I was simply one of those children who are often sick.

At twenty-one, I passed the entrance exam for speech therapy school.

My mother cried tears of joy.

I had chosen Paris. Living there as a student was great. It had everything: specialized institutes for learning, exhibitions, and people like us.

Freedom.

Then, one March, I caught bronchitis.

Nothing too unusual for me.

However, this time it developed into sinusitis. It took a whole month of antibiotics for the infection to clear up.

After that episode, I continued to have some phlegm.

At the time, I didn't pay much attention to them. I thought they would disappear once I had finished recovering.

They never left.

Expectorating phlegm is much more exhausting than you might imagine.

The whole body is shaken by the cough. Then come the aches, the fatigue, and the feeling of having been completely drained of strength.

It's not simple socially either.

A deep, hollow cough followed by expectoration is hard to miss,