16/11/2025
Exactly 10 years ago, I was walking out of the hospital after almost 36 hours spent operating on the victims of the November 13th Paris attacks.
I remember feeling dazed, confused, scared… and overwhelmingly sad.
During all those hours in the OR, one feeling never left me: I wanted to be somewhere else.
With my wife, with my kids.
I wanted to make sure they were safe.
I wanted to flee Paris.
No one knew what was coming next.
No one knew if it was over.
Calls from paramedics kept coming in, mixed with false alarms about new attacks.
Families and friends looking for missing loved ones were calling nonstop.
It went on all night, all day, all night again…
All that mattered to me was to finish operating on every wounded person we received, and then run to my family.
For months afterward, I couldn’t take the metro.
I didn’t feel safe anywhere in Paris — not even on the train leaving the city.
For years, I couldn’t talk about November 13th at all.
What few knew that night is that the patients I operated on were at the beginning of a long, painful journey:
years of surgeries, of débridements, flaps, bone grafts, external fixations…
Years before reclaiming a normal life.
Some of them eventually followed me to Annecy.
Together, step by step, we completed the last phases of their reconstruction.
In a way, accompanying them through this path was the only way to process what happened during those nights of November 13th and 14th, 2015.
Ten years later, I still remember every detail of those days, and of the months and years that followed. They have shaped me forever.
But I am lucky — still today — to remain in contact with several of these patients, survivors of the attacks.
And what they represent is, to me, the strongest possible victory against terrorism:
They live.
They live full lives.
Which means they won.
