Former Soccer Player Jean-Pierre Adams Dies After Spending 39 Years In A Coma
Former France international defender Jean-Pierre Adams who spent thirty-nine years in a coma has Died. He was 78.
The soccer legend was pronounced dead on Monday at the Nimes University Hospital.
The Senegal-born defender slipped into a coma when he was 34-years old in 1982.
The coma followed an anaesthesia error during knee surgery at Lyon Hospital.
He failed to wake up after the operation and spent the rest of his life on life support.
CNN reports that his wife Bernadette Adams was with her husband until he breathed his last.
The former soccer player was unable to communicate and express emotion but he was still able to breathe, feel, eat and cough without the aid of medical equipment and lived at home near Nimes.
Many questioned whether he should have been kept in a vegetative state for 39 years.
“People on Facebook say he should be unplugged… But he is not plugged! I just don’t have the courage to stop giving him food and water,” Bernadette once revealed.
“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.”
Wife Speaks As Former Soccer Player Jean-Pierre Adams Dies After Spending 39 Years In A Coma That Never Stopped Love
It is reported that following a ligament rupture injury, Adams checked into the Édouard Herriot Hospital in Lyon.
Adams was booked in for a routine surgery and expected to leave hospital in a few days time.
Things did not go as planned after an anaesthetist made a near-fatal error and gave Adams the wrong dose ahead of the operation.
Sadly, Adams suffered a bronchospasm, which starved his brain of oxygen.
Speaking to CNN, Bernadette said:
“The female anesthetist was looking after eight patients, one after the other, like an assembly line.
“Jean-Pierre was supervised by a trainee, who was repeating a year, who later admitted in court: ‘I was not up to the task I was entrusted with’.
In the 1990s, a court ruled that both the anaesthetist and trainee be given one-month suspended sentences, as well as a hefty fine.
Adams played 22 times for the France national team from 1972 to 1976 and made 41 appearances for Ligue 1 giants PSG.
