Life has the gift of bringing opposites together.
That night in November 2012, Baptiste Beaulieu felt an “incomprehensible mixture of infinite sadness and great joy”.
Called for a drug suicide attempt, he fails to revive this 17-year-old high school student, who dies in his hands, in front of his boarding school mates.
In the ambulance that brings him back to the hospital, while he rehashes this dramatic moment, the radio crackles.
A team has been called across town for a difficult delivery.
Suddenly, the cries of the newborn, in great shape, escape the loudspeaker and fill the funeral procession with life.
It is 3 am and the intern, upset, understands that he cannot keep this story to himself.
At the age of 27, he created a blog where he tells about his daily life in the Auch emergency room (Gers), depicts "those who are lying down and those who pick them up".
Reconciling patients and caregivers.
He then interweaves some of these anecdotes in a first book, entitled “So there you are, the 1001 lives of emergencies”, published in 2013 and translated into fourteen languages.
Today, Baptiste Beaulieu is 35 years old, a bushy beard collar and rimmed glasses of a professor.
He chose to leave the noise of emergencies to settle as a general practitioner, in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne), his hometown.
"In the hospital, the patient is lying naked under a dehumanizing gown, at the mercy of an army of caregivers who know everything about him", explains the one who campaigns for another way of treating suffering.
One day, a supervisor told him that he was too empathetic to be a good practitioner.
Ten years later, he has made his emotions his strength.
He even confides, laughing, that his power is to make people cry.
Far from the coldness of hospital relations, he likes the serenity of his office, this "level ground": seated facing each other, each in his civilian clothes, two people can meet.
“I have to be a sanctuary for patients to let go.
"
Advice, doubts, anger and humor
Baptiste Beaulieu shares this vision with Martin Winckler, whose novel "Sachs' Disease", recounting the daily life of a country doctor, nourished him.
“The role of a healthcare professional is to be the patient advocate,” says Martin Winckler, an activist doctor who paved the way for a more human approach to his profession.
For Baptiste, to care is to be of service.
»And pass on.
“In his speeches, he does popular education, he fights against received ideas while being reassuring.
It's rare in France, ”he adds.
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Very present on social networks - he is followed by more than 114,000 people on Instagram - Baptiste Beaulieu gives advice, delivers his doubts, shares anger and humor.
Through the messages and "stories" written on the spot, he questions his profession, his way of caring, his dominant position (being born a boy, possessing knowledge), he affirms his identity ("generalist, homosexual") and his commitments "against sexism, racism, homophobia, in society in general, and in the medical world in particular".
Positions that he has also defended, since September 2018, on France Inter.
On the air, he proclaims the importance of asking the patient for his consent before examining him, or gets annoyed at the machismo of medicine.
"We have plenty of drugs to alleviate erection problems, but only two molecules to relieve period pain, which affects 50% of the population and come back every month for almost half of their life," he denounces. he.
This keen commitment, as well as his benevolence, immediately pleased Ali Rebeihi, producer and host of the radio program "Grand bien vous faire!"
», During which the doctor delivers his chronicles every Monday.
“Baptiste's leitmotif is listening.
Listeners often share their feelings with us after his speeches.
It is as if he had succeeded in understanding their torments.
"
No moral lesson
In this timed, almost surgical exercise, he endeavors not to be a moralist, but to pass on the lessons learned little by little from his experience.
“If I provoke a reflection in listeners or in young doctors, I will have succeeded part of my life.
"
Stories, the thirty-something, carried by the quiet strength of the one who fulfills his childhood dreams - writing novels and caring for people - has his phone full.
He logs them into a note-taking app that he obsessively fills out.
“Medicine is fertile ground.
There are always beautiful things to notice in people, although most of the time they don't know how beautiful they are.
"
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The author is never far from the doctor. During this year of pandemic, surrounded during the day by the Covid-19, he takes refuge in the evening in the writing of a love story, poetic, whimsical. Far from the white coats and the stethoscope. "The one he was waiting for" will be released on April 28, published by Fayard. A dose of lightness against the ambient gloom, that is his prescription.
