It seems very curious but it is like that

We are on March 24, 1954, in Minnaepolis, in the United States, and Jonathan is a boy of exactly one year. He is very cute, intelligent, but he very lean, very short of breath and very pale. Unfortunately, it has a hole. It seems very curious but it is like that. It's a hole in the heart. If it cannot be this hole, Jonathan will die. This is not complicated to plug a hole. This is Couture: there is a room, it sews. The only problem is that it happens within the heart. To close this hole and save the life of this child, he will have to return in the heart, i.e. the stop, the flush of his blood, and keep alive this child for an hour, an hour and a half. At first glance, it is absolutely impossible. And, yet, thought for a long time to produce machines called heart-lung machines. There are very ingenious people who are doing research, but the tests do not work. And then that day, March 24, 1954, a surgeon called Lillehei decides to operate that child, and his father will serve as a heart-lung.

The mounting is extraordinary. There is a child, elongated, and everything near him, his father. They are asleep naturally; It will link the arterial system and the venous system by pipes with small pumps between the pipes for pulse blood. The breathing of the father will be used to oxygenate the blood and return it to the child. This is what is called the cross traffic. Jonathan, who was to die, will live. After him, 45 children will be made with this technique. At the time, there were of course critics who argue that the operation, "it is 200 of chess" possible because it was the death of the father and the child. But the story of Jonathan shows how it can overcome what seemed truly impossible.

Are now a small jump fifty years later, today. We are in Minnesota, but in Bamako, Mali. The small Oumar twelve years, it is very blue. "Blue children" are children who oxygenate not well, who could not walk. It is the absolute despair for him and his parents because he will die.

And it's crazy when you think. With a not terribly expensive ticket, about a dozen of thousands of euros, and loving family that will allow it to Paris, it can two months later, instead of dying, return to Bamako in Mali, and type in a ball of foot, which is still the dream of most of the boys. And it will type in life, type in the impossible. This was impossible, was unthinkable for him was realized.

It is true that our body is not required to do the impossible. Tomorrow, I can not, despite all my will, climb on Mount Everest. My head is also limited. I am unable to explain a too complicated equation. But at the level of our souls, there is so much more interesting because we do not at all the same limits. We have taken on them. Our "me" can act at this time that repel the impossible. It does not become all sister Emmanuelle. But, if we are the becoming just a little bit, we could really do things. I am not at all a revolutionary, but I still love this sentence of Che Guevara: "Let's be realistic, demand the impossible!".