Curtains have fallen on French footballer Jean-Pierre Adams who has been in a coma for 39 years. Adams slipped into a deep coma in 1982 after an anesthesia error while undergoing routine knee surgery at a French hospital.
The footballer was confirmed dead on Monday, September 6, at the Nimes University Hospital aged 73.
During his active playing days, the Senegalese-born defender turned out for a number of French clubs, including Nice and Paris Saint-Germain.
However, as his career entered the twilight years, life, and indeed his journey to stardom, took a rather sudden and tragic twist.
While aged 34, Adams walked into a Lyon hospital to undergo a routine surgery on his knee, with that being the last time he walked, talked, or even voluntarily moved any of his muscles again. For nearly four decades until his death, Adams was bedridden. It is understood a major blunder involving a wrong dosage of anesthetic saw him starved of oxygen, resulting in catastrophic brain damage. 
The surgery could have waited, CNN said, but it went ahead anyway. And the errors compounded, as CNN reported – the anesthesiologist was looking after eight patients, and Adams’ care was being supervised by a trainee. Badly intubated, Adams had one tube blocking the pathway to his lungs instead of ventilating them, CNN said, starving him of oxygen until he went into cardiac arrest.
Adams never regained consciousness and spent the ensuing decades in a coma at his home in the southern French city of Nimes, his wife Bernadette by his side, The Associated Press said.
Bernadette most recently spoke up about Adams’s well-being in April 2020. There had been speculation about euthanasia, but she put that notation to the task.
“People on Facebook say he should be unplugged… But he is not plugged!” she said. “I just don’t have the courage to stop giving him food and water. He has a normal routine. He wakes up at 7, eats… He may be in a vegetative state, but he can hear and sit in a wheelchair.”
However, Bernadette had her critics, including Adams’s former partner on the France team, Marius Tresor. The pair were a powerful force from 1972 to 1976 and were known as “the Black Guard” because they were awesome defenders for France. Tresor expressed his thoughts about Adams’s condition, according to Paris United in 2019.
“Even if Jean-Pierre wakes up now, he will hardly recognize anything. So is it worth it to keep living like this? If something like this should happen to me, I told my wife not to do anything to hold me back….”
Adams made more than 140 appearances for Nice, winning 22 caps for France between 1972 and 1976. Before that he made 84 appearances for Nimes as well, playing for them from 1970-73 as he scored 10 goals in 98 matches before moving to Nice, where he played nearly 150 games and scored 17 goals.
Watch the video report below:
Sources: AWM, CNN, The Associated Press
Leave a Comment