This article was updated on 08/09/2021 at 9.42 am.

Former French Defender Jean-Pierre Adams Dies after spending nearly 40years in Coma

In a report a few hours ago from the Nimes University Hospital in France, it was confirmed that former Paris Saint Germain, Nice, and Nimes defender, Jean-Pierre Adams, has passed away at age 73 after spending 39 years in a coma. According to reliable sources, Jean-Pierre Adams fell into a coma during the administration of a nearly fatal dose of anaesthetic during a routine knee operation that was supervised by a trainee. The medical error left a horrible effect on Jean-Pierre Adams’ brain and made him suffer a cardiac arrest that put him in a coma. 

Until his death, after the terrible incident his wife, Bernadette, had been caring for him. She had always believed that one day the Dakar-born former French international would wake up. Bernadette in 2007: “Jean-Pierre feels, smells, hears, jumps when a dog barks. But he cannot see.” 

Jean-Pierre Adams left Senegal’s capital Dakar for France at the age of 10. He became a professional footballer in 1967 and he decided to end his club football career at Chalon (a French football club) in 1981. On the international level, Jean-Pierre Adams made 22 caps for Les Bleus between 1972 and 1976. 

After hanging his boots, Jean-Pierre Adams got fascinated with the coaching job and he decided to attend a coaching course in Dijon (France). During his coaching programme in the aforementioned city, suffered a serious knee injury that had him put a pause to his coaching dream and attend to the discomforting knee. 

In a bid to get himself relieved from the pains he was suffering from his damaged knee, Jean-Pierre Adams who was only 34 years old at that time decided to visit a hospital in Lyon that advised him to undergo surgery to treat the struggling knee after a scan revealed he had damaged the tendon at the back of his knee. 

 Instead of coming out of the hospital healed of his knee injury after agreeing to the surgical operation, Jean-Pierre Adams fell into a coma and never woke up since then after he was administered anaesthesia by one of the hospital’s anaesthetists and trainee that carried out the operation for him. 

Did his wife, Bernadette, ever considered Euthanasia for Jean-Pierre Adams?

After about 15 months in the hospital in Lyon, Bernadette was advised that the best place for her husband would be somewhere near home and since then she had taken it upon herself to take care of Jean-Pierre Adams until his death. Bernadette: “I don’t think they knew how to look after him, so I said to myself: ‘He will come home and I’ve looked after him ever since.”

The catastrophic brain damage that Adams suffered deprived him of so much oxygen that the chances of him coming out of all that conscious again almost seemed impossible but his wife refused to let go. She was relentless in helping Adams meet his primary needs in the hope that Jean-Pierre Adams would come out of coma someday: “The more time that passes, the more bothered I get. His condition does not get any worse, so who knows? If one day, medical science evolves, then why not? Will there be a day when they’ll know how to do something for him? I don’t know.” 

When the euthanasia option was brought to her, Bernadette gave a straight “no, no, no” kind of answer: “What do you want me to do — deprive him of food? Let him die little by little? No, no, no.” Bernadette never wanted her husband dead – she was never going to agree to switch off the life-support machine that Adams was then on. 

Why was a trainee assigned to supervise Jean-Pierre Adams’ Knee Operation?

A lot of the medical workers at the hospital in Lyon were said to be unable due to the strike ongoing then on the day of the surgical operation (March 1982). This led to inexperienced workers attending to Jean-Pierre Adams. The operation wasn’t called off due to the strike and a trainee that later admitted the surgery was too big for him supervised the operation – “I was not up to the task I was entrusted with.”

Have there been any consequences to the Perpetrators?

Since when Jean-Pierre Adams’ unfortunate incident happened in 1982, stoic Bernadette had to endure till 1989 before finally having the Seventh Chamber of Correctional Tribunal in Lyon ruled in her favour. The medical staff in charge of Adams’ surgery were declared guilty of “involuntary injury” and they were each fined 750 euros with a one-month suspended sentence too.