The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly - Jean-Dominique Bauby

In December 1995, French journalist and editor-in-chief of Elle magazine Jean-Dominique Bauby seemed to have it all. He was a happy and healthy father of two with a successful career and many friends, a man known for his wit, style and love of life. However, on an outing with his young son not long before Christmas, he was suddenly taken ill and needed to be rushed into hospital with breathing difficulties, where he soon lost consciousness. After 20 days in a coma, Bauby awoke to find that he had suffered a catastrophic stroke in his brain stem, which had left his mind fully functioning but trapped in a body he could no longer control, depriving him of movement and ...

Jean Dominique-Bauby, the editor-in-chief of the French magazine Elle, was just 43 on the 8th of December 1995 when his life changed completely. Following a stoke, leaving him with damage to his brain stem, Bauby was left with a condition known as 'locked in syndrome'. Locked-in-syndrome is a thankfully incredibly rare condition which leaves the sufferer unable to move any part of his or her body, excepting the eyelids and unable to speak, whilst retaining all mental capacity. This is the world in which Bauby awoke after a 20-day coma following his stroke. It is a horrifying thought. Jean Dominique-Bauby wrote The Diving-bell and the Butterfly ...

On first picking up 'The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly'it will strike you that it is a very small book, a slim volume of only 139 pages, but on reading this story and with the realisation of how it was written, it transforms before your eyes in to a giant piece of work, a story so mamoth in its telling that I defy anyone not to be impressed. When I reached page 139, I did something that I have never done before. I took a deep breath and turned to the first page of the story and started again. Jean-Dominique Bauby, was editor-in-chief of French Elle, the father of two young children, he had a successful career and a life many of us would envy. ...