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Alain Cocq, a terminally ill Frenchman, who was prevented from broadcasting his final days live on Facebook, accepted palliative care after refusing food and medicine for more than three days.
Cocq, 57, was admitted to hospital days after using his situation to draw attention to the conditions of terminally ill patients in France who are not allowed to die according to his wishes.
“I’m sorry, but I need a bit of serenity to leave in peace,” he said through his spokesperson, lawyer Sophie Medjeberg, who explained that Cocq had been admitted to the main hospital in the city of Dijon on Monday.
“He is suffering too much, it was too hard,” Medjeberg told AFP on Tuesday. “She still wants to go but without suffering.”
Medjeberg said he did not know if the doctors would resort to “deep sedation that could lead to an irreversible coma or if they would send him home with a mobile hospice unit.”
Facebook blocks live streamed video
Last week he received a letter from French President Emmanuel Macron in response to a request for deep sedation, which Macron says he cannot comply with because French law currently does not allow active assistance to die.
French end-of-life laws, updated in 2016, only authorize deep sedation for patients with “short-term” life-threatening conditions, which Cocq cannot prove.
Cocq stopped taking food, drink and medicine after his last meal on Friday night. On Saturday, he began livestreaming his final days on Facebook, saying he believed he had less than a week to live.
The social network blocked the live broadcast and said Sunday that its terms and conditions did not allow the site to “show suicide attempts.”
Longtime activist
Cocq suffers from a rare genetic disease that causes the walls of the arteries to accumulate. His condition is so rare that it has no name and there are only three other known cases.
He was first diagnosed at age 23, after falling down a flight of stairs. Doctors at the time told him that he had two weeks to live.
Long confined to a wheelchair, Cocq was a longtime activist for the rights of people with disabilities and the right to die.
He took his case to the European Court of Human Rights in 1993, traveled through France and Europe in 1994.
Later, confined to a medicalized bed, Cock attended the yellow vest protests in Dijon. Most recently, he was unable to leave the bed in his apartment.
His plight has been compared to that of Vincent Lambert, a Frenchman who died last year after being artificially kept alive for 11 years following a car accident and whose case revealed deep divisions over the right to die.
(with AFP)
