Did you know that Jean-Pierre Adams, the French footballer who died at the age of 73 after being in a coma for 39 years, is a native of Senegal?

Following a ligament rupture injury, Jean-Pierre Adams, a French professional footballer who played as a centre-back, was hospitalised for surgery on 17 March 1982 at the Édouard Herriot Hospital in Lyon. Because many hospital staff were on strike during that time, errors were made by his anesthetist and a trainee, who later admitted to being "not up to the task"; as a result, Adams suffered a bronchospasm which starved his brain of oxygen and he slipped into a coma for 39 years, a coma he didn't survive from.

◼️ From Senegal to France 

Adams was born 10 March 1948 and raised in Dakar until the age of 10, when he left his native Senegal on a pilgrimage to Montargis in the Loiret department accompanied by his grandmother, a devout Catholic. When they arrived, she enrolled him at a local Catholic school, Saint-Louis de Montargis. He was adopted by a French couple shortly after his arrival in the country.

◼️ His sojourn into football 

During his studies, Adams worked at a local rubber manufacturer and he started playing football at several local clubs in the Loiret area. He started playing with Entente BFN in 1967 as a striker, with whom he was runner-up in the Championnat de France Amateur twice. In 1970, he signed a contract with Nîmes, going on to remain in Division 1 for the following nine seasons, also representing Nice and Paris Saint-Germain. In the 1971–72 campaign, Adams contributed four goals in all 38 games to help Nîmes to a best-ever second place, also winning the Cup of the Alps. He added a career-best nine for Nice in 1973–74, for a final fifth position.

After one year in Division 2 with Mulhouse, Adams retired in 1981 at the age of 33, following a spell with amateurs Chalon as player-coach. On 15 June 1972, Adams made his debut for the France national team in an unofficial exhibition game against an African XI selected by the Confederation of African Football. His first competitive cap came on 13 October of that year, in a 1–0 home win over the Soviet Union for the 1974 FIFA World Cup qualifiers. Adams' last of his 22 appearances occurred on 1 September 1976, in a friendly with Denmark. During his tenure with Les Bleus, he formed a stopper partnership with Marius Trésor which was dubbed La garde noire (black guard).

◼️ Marriage and family

Adams and his wife Bernadette were married in April 1969 and had two sons: Laurent (born 1969) and Frédéric (1976). Bernadette and Adams met at a local dance in a small French town. She was 24 and he was 19. She was a rural French girl and he was an African immigrant. He had played professionally for a while but gave it up, first for a plow hitch, then a construction job and finally for the furnace of a local factory. They went to famous nightclubs. They drank champagne. Their home in the Paris suburbs had a wide balcony. They saw James Brown in Lyon and Aretha Franklin in Paris. They danced. Their lives were filled with music.

◼️ From a minor incident to a major one

Adams, while coaching his son's football team, hurt his knee. A nagging, relatively minor injury but one he would need to handle if he wanted to keep running around with kids. He made an appointment at a hospital in Lyon for Wednesday, March 17, 1982. At nine in the morning, he called his wife, Bernadette, and said doctors were on the way to give him the anesthesia. Then at noon she called the hospital for the first time. The doctors told her he was still in surgery. She left their sport shop for a lunch break, and in between feeding the kids, she called four more times. After reopening around 2 p.m., she called again. "Something happened," a staff member explained. "We will give you to the doctor and he will explain." Finally she heard a doctor's voice, "It's very serious," he told her flatly. “You have to come right away.”

◼️ A wife's unflinching love

Bernadette hung up with the doctor that day. Two football executives insisted on driving her to the hospital in Lyon. When she arrived the doctors told her to wait. Finally they ushered her into a room. She saw Adams lying on a bed, packed in ice, plugs running out of his mouth and arms. He couldn't speak. His eyes would open but otherwise there was little sign of brain activity. She started asking questions immediately, and the more she asked, the less information the doctors and staff seemed to have. That didn't make sense. How did a healthy athlete go in for minor elective surgery and end up brain-dead? When she got no answers, she chose to believe in the most powerful thing she'd ever experienced: her love for Adams.

She sat with him. She talked to him about the kids. She brought his big boxer, Ludo, hoping the dog might stir his consciousness. She made a recording of Ludo barking to play for him. His closest teammate, Jacky Vergnes, came, too. He remembers clearly her almost yelling at her husband, "You WILL come back! You WILL come back!" then wheeling around to Jacky and yelling, "He WILL come back!" At first, Jacky talked to Adams, too. Sometimes Adam's eyes would move. Jacky would clap and Adams would jump. Maybe he might wake up soon. Jacky sat by his bed and recounted great goals and close games. "The medical people I talked to said that he could hear us, but they didn't know if he could understand," he says. “Or maybe he could understand us but he couldn't communicate with us.”

◼️ From critical to worse

The hospital transferred Adams after two months to another facility, far from Bernadette's home. She could only visit on Sundays. Every night she called. She always believed that the next call, the next morning, might bring different news. Each time the doctor reported nothing had changed. One night the doctor blurted out what all the medical experts believed but, until now, couldn't bring themselves to say: "You know," he said, “his condition won't get better.”

Adams not only didn't improve but he kept getting worse, little by little. Soon he couldn't breathe on his own. He lost 24 pounds in a month. The doctors started feeding him with a tube. Bernadette believed they were counting the days until he died and his bed freed up. She demanded the doctors remove the feeding tube and she patiently spooned him bite after bite of yogurt. She started working on a little twirling motion to get him to swallow since he still had no voluntary muscle control.

She got him transferred to a different facility, closer to her home. Now she went to see him twice a day, at lunch and before supper. He kept declining. During one visit, the sun bright and warm, she decided to move him closer to the window. When she peeled back the sheet, she saw a huge, dirty bandage. "Oh," the nurse told her, "he has a bedsore. We forgot to tell you." Other people passing through the medical machine whispered to her that these rehab facilities were where discarded humans were sent to die. As she tried to figure out another way, she got a letter from the French government. Although the football community would continue its generous support, the government would no longer pay for his hospital stay. On June 13, 1983, Bernadette Adams took Jean-Pierre home.

◼️ Trusting in God 

Bernadette used to put more trust in God. A few years after the accident, she had Adams loaded on a special train and taken back to the miraculous healing waters of Lourdes, where he came all those years before with his grandmother. Every day the nuns lowered him into the water, with doctors overseeing the whole thing. Nothing changed. When Adams came home from Lourdes, Jacky gave up the last of his hope that anything would ever change. The Lord had his reasons for not healing Adams and for Jacky, that was enough. He made his choice, a way of understanding something as senseless as Adam's accident.

When they left the hospital in 1983, she called their home The House of the Beautiful Sleeping Athlete. She fed him five meals a day, cooking vegetables and meat and blending them into a mush. Every bite she carefully fed him with a spoon. Meals took hours. Each one faded into the next. Sometimes he'd just cough all the food out. Once he coughed so hard he broke a tooth. Then his teeth started falling out. She got them fixed. She persevered. Slowly she trained his muscles to work with her. A little dance, with just the right amount of spoon twirl. He began to put on weight. There were no tubes, no wires, no machines.

She and a helper got him into a wheelchair. He wore diapers. When she didn't have assistants, the boys helped. At first she got his torso and let her sons take the legs but as they got stronger, those roles reversed. She bathed him and talked doctors and therapists through his needs. Seven days a week. The kids learned to talk to him, to watch football games with him. Every year they got him a cake on his birthday. The kids blew out his candles and the whole family sang. They wrapped presents and then unwrapped them. Everyone always got him the same thing, the only thing he needed: the long-sleeved T-shirts he wore all day. His closet remained trapped in amber, full of 1970s clothes he once wore around Parisian nightclubs. Bernadette stopped celebrating their wedding anniversary after 1982.

◼️ Not giving up

The final test was to hook him up to equipment that would measure any activity in the brain after sounds, images or touches, which can tell a doctor if the patient can detect a stimulus, even in a diminished capacity. Bernadette lived her whole life believing that one day Adams might awake, and she found examples in other people to justify that faith, but Dr. Pellas says her faith was just a way of getting through the day. After having lost so much of it, after having had it ripped from her, she believed in herself and in their love. This new doctor had knowledge and learning, but so did those doctors in Lyon. Dr. Pellas understands all of this.

All these years she searched for answers. The doctors in Lyon insisted they had no idea what had gone wrong. One of those freak things, they said. It happens to a tiny percentage of patients. But Bernadette wouldn't accept that answer. The family was, understandably, suspicious of the entire medical-industrial complex. She'd take Adams to doctors for checkups and always refused to leave the room. Her own children didn't trust the doctors, either. When Laurent had surgery on his Achilles, he refused the general anesthesia.

◼️ Legal action, victory and loss

So Bernadette hired a lawyer with no proof, no case, just a suspicion.The French Football Federation hired a lawyer, too, and for the next decade these men fought the hospital. Hearing after hearing, discovery after discovery, the truth came out. The hospital staff in Lyon had been on strike. The doctors should have postponed all elective procedures but did not. The anesthesiologist, because of the strike, sedated eight patients alone. One doctor monitored everyone in two rooms. A single nurse monitored Adams. She was an intern and such a poor student she'd been forced to repeat parts of her medical training.

It took more than a decade, but Bernadette's lawyers made the hospital admit that the anesthesiologist intubated him improperly. The mistake accidentally cut off his supply of oxygen, and the two doctors and one nurse never noticed. In the criminal case, only the anesthesiologist and the nurse received any punishment: one month in jail, suspended, and a modest fine. They got to continue their careers. 

Bernadette's legal battle was over and, although it took 12 years, she received enough money in the verdict to take care of Adams forever. She got to hire some extra help to make her life just a little easier, but she also lost the clarifying purpose of her legal fight. The person she saw in the mirror was a middle-aged woman, with one kid out of the house and another soon to leave, with a husband who wouldn't wake up. She continued to tend to his needs, refusing to consider euthanasia. She just went back to work, trying to fight the bedsore, feeding him four meals a day, each one down to a half-hour now, them working in concert at last. The bedsore did not heal. Infection set in. Word spread among their old friends that the end was near.

◼️ Finally, freedom in death

Adams died on 6 September 2021 in Nîmes at the age of 73, after being in a coma for 39 years. The following day, he was honoured with a minute's applause prior to the World Cup qualifier between France and Finland in Lyon.

Sources: Wikipedia | ESPN (Culled from the article: 'France and PSG star Jean-Pierre Adams was in a coma for 39 years. His wife never left his side' by Wright Thompson. Read full story here: https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/37625948/france-psg-star-jean-pierre-adams-was-coma-39-years-wife-never-left-side

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