"There you go: I'm not having a hard time anymore.
My penis is dead, reduced to a vague presence without life, without heat, something that dangles, a wrinkled skin through which passes urine, urine and nothing else.
I have no more semen.
»It is with these unspeakable raw words that Jean-Marc Sylvestre's story begins.
With "Everything is not screwed up!"
"(Ed. Albin Michel, 288 pages, 18.90 euros), which has just been published, the economist and journalist signs an explosive work, mixing personal confidences, humor, and meticulous analyzes of the" screed of lead ", surrounding prostate cancer.
Diagnosed more than fifteen years ago at an early stage thanks to the initiative of his general practitioner, the former columnist of France Inter discovered the macabre dilemma facing men affected by this disease.
Because, taken in time, the chances of remission are important.
But treatments can lead to urinary incontinence, erectile dysfunction, or even a complete inability to get an erection.
On the other hand, this slow growing cancer can leave you in peace for ten years before causing death in excruciating pain, by metastasizing to the bones.
"Extract the crab without damaging my shotgun"
So enjoy or die?
Alongside Jean-Marc Sylvestre, the reader realizes with horror that many men prefer to wait for a potentially distant death than to risk living powerless.
"A doctor friend told me:
you're young, you have to have an operation,
" he told Le Parisien.
“Live yes, but in what state?
»He asks, however.
The journalist then engages in a meticulous investigation into the heart of the medical world of prostate cancer, in order to choose his remedy - ablation - but also the best surgeon to operate.
The one "capable of extracting the crab from me without damaging my hunting rifle," he sums up with his schoolboy poetry.
Now completely cured, Jean-Marc Sylvestre took up writing at the age of 74 to share his “ten years of hardship”, to regain his libido.
"It was complicated, but it got better over time, and with age my requirements may have also decreased," he confides.
Also to demonstrate that, faced with this evil, betting on life is a winning bet.
"Prostates have always been classified as a state secret"
Finally, it is the powerlessness of speech that his work denounces, rather than that of the sexes.
Neither his friends nor his family nor his colleagues ever knew anything until they read it.
“The impossibility of talking about it resulted in this book, it was the only solution, to free me and regain my self-confidence,” he explains.
Because this condition crosses two fundamental taboos: cancer and male impotence.
And more than the others, the men of power cannot accept a disease which attacks so head-on the cultural construction of virility.
Mitterrand, of course, but also General de Gaulle, Churchill, Clemenceau and even Donald Trump.
"Prostates have always been classified as a state secret," notes the author in a chapter which deciphers how the leaders have always firmly locked information on this subject.
Yet silence kills.
10,000 men die each year in France from cancer which, spotted early, can be well treated.
Jean-Marc Sylvestre therefore calls on the public authorities to make screening compulsory from the age of 50, on the model of what exists for breast cancer.
"Let us take the example of women," he urges.
