lucie Retail dances again. Without hands or feet, without complexes too. Once a month, this single mother of three leaves her home in Blain (Loire-Atlantique) with her prostheses and gets into her automatic car, heading to Vertou, an hour away by car, where a supposed “teacher” is waiting for her. of dance”. .intuitive”. A video posted on her Instagram account shows her in the middle of a parquet floor, gracefully swaying with her four incomplete limbs to the sound of a romance in English. Lucie Retail practiced the dance “before.” Today nothing can deprive him of it. Neither the laws of balance nor the poison of the other’s gaze.
The 43-year-old former saleswoman, a polyamputee, became a polyamputee because of a mosquito during a trip to Africa in early 2023. Severe malaria then caused necrosis of her limbs. To the doctor who told her about the unbearable obligation to cut off her hands and feet, she responded, not without humor: “That wasn’t part of the program. »
continued “three months of despair” whose climax was the departure of his partner – who, in the end, did not turn out to be “It is not a great loss: it was violent and unfaithful”he states. Then came acceptance and the decision to thwart “the widespread idea that a disabled person is necessarily poor and depressed”. How many times, after your operation, were you told, insensitively, that your ” place, [on] “I would have preferred to die” ? Without imagining for a second “Spend your days eating ice cream under the duvet while watching Netflix.”Lucie Retail has chosen to live. At one hundred miles an hour.
“Grace in horror”
The deprivation of his grip and locomotion functions did not prevent him, in September, from climbing the Taillon peak (3,144 meters), in the Pyrenees, on the initiative of an association of amputees. Nor participate in a fashion show organized by a brand of sports shoes. At the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, his testimony radiated the opening ceremony: “I have a body that survivedwe heard her say on the giant screens of the Stadium de France. It no longer corresponds to the codes of femininity. But he is stronger and more beautiful than ever. » Invited by UNESCO to an international conference on the inclusion of people with disabilities, she was able to insist on the idea that the famous “other’s gaze” poses less of a problem than “The vision that people with disabilities have of themselves”.
His reflects the inverted image of his previous life. The midlife crisis had taken hold of this export director of a Nantes company that manufactures disinfection and hygiene products: divorce from the father of her children, conventional dismissal from her employer… Her quadruple amputation was then a revelation: “The realization that I had spent my life trying to control it, flailing in every direction, seeking performance, trying to become a good person.”open.
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