It was a year ago, all of France was confined for the first time. This March 17, 2020, Eric Moutard, owner of the bar “Le Biarritz” in Auxerre, did not yet know that two days later he would be plunged into a coma because of the covid. This coronavirus survivor tells us how he escaped death and kept his taste for life even more.
It was around March 13, 2020 that Eric Moutard began to feel profoundly tired to the point of forgetting customer orders. “A coffee, a cream, I arrived at the bar to prepare them, I no longer remember what they had ordered.“Twice doctors dismiss the idea of covid until the positive test. Two days later, he returns to the hospital.”I was having trouble breathing and I remember when the stretcher bearers picked me up from the house, I had a black hole the whole way. And there I arrive at the emergency room. It was the road to death: Covid-19.“
Eric also remembers the doctors asking him if he wanted to be plunged into an artificial coma. “I said yes, I don’t know why. I am a fighter. And it was gone for five weeks. When I woke up, I couldn’t walk, nothing. (…) In the intensive care unit, I saw all the staff, always with kind words. Besides, I wrote it, I wrote a letter on February 9 to the director of the Auxerre hospital because they really saved me.“
At 62, the bar owner will take five weeks to come out of intensive care and three weeks to relearn to walk. He knows he’s coming from afar. He still perceives some after-effects as memory problems, linked according to him to the lack of professional activity. From Auxerre hospital, he keeps this memory: “From the person who does the cleaning to the head of department, they were so kind, you can’t tell, it makes me want to cry. Because I had already heard ‘yes, Auxerre hospital, they are good for nothing’, all that … We are not allowed to say that.“
“They are really saved” – Eric, bar owner in Auxerre, survivor of the coronavirus
A life lesson on happiness
This emotion is also tinged with anger in Éric Moutard: “People don’t realize. Some continue to kiss … You can’t play with other people’s lives. “ And he draws a lesson for life from this experience. “This disease has already taught me that in life we are not much, we must remain humble and then help others because happiness is not much is to love people.“People that Eric Moutard hopes one day soon to see again leaning on his bar.
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