In an interview, Francisco’s medical team manager described as “miracle” that the 88 -year -old pontiff left the hospital, but said that to recover he needs to change his work rhythm.
Pope’s doctors did not believe he would survive.
“It is terrible,” said Pope Francis with efforts while he had a respiratory crisis last month. The Pope, with his hand bruised by the brands of the syringes and the oxygen saturation descending dangerously to 78 during his long hospitalization, recognized in a weak voice that he could die. He held his doctor’s hand.
Francisco had ruled out the intubation, which would mean keeping it unconscious, said the head of the medical team, Sergio Alfieri. So the doctors decided to treat the pneumonia suffered in both lungs with a last flood of drugs that ran the risk of damaging their organs.
The closest assistants of the Pope were filled with tears when the doctors asked permission from the Pope’s personal nurse, empowered to make decisions of life or death, to move forward with a more aggressive treatment. He gave his consent and, finally, the Pope responded positively.
Even so, the worst had not happened yet. Less than a week later, Francisco regurgitated some food and began to choked. The doctors, fearing that he died in the spot, immediately sucked the airways, but worried that inhalation would aggravate his lungs, deeply infected. His chief doctor was worried that everything was lost.
But it was not so.
On Sunday, 38 days after entering the Agostino Gemelli hospital, Alfieri discharged the leader of the Catholic Church to return to the Vatican. He implored his patient, who initially resisted going to the hospital, to rest and recover so as not to waste the opportunity that had been given to him.
“It was a miracle that left the hospital,” said Alfieri, adding that the Pope “was no longer in danger.”
But when Francisco made a brief appearance on the weekend, the public had an sobering vision of the ravages that the health crisis had caused in the 88 -year -old Pope. By greeting the supporters from the balcony of a hospital, his voice was so weak that he touched the inaudible, and his breathing so agitated that sometimes it seemed to gasp.
“The decline is noted,” said Carlos Aguirre, a pilgrim from Colorado Springs, while watching Francisco struggled to speak.
Francisco’s doctor said the Pope had accepted a convalescence of two months that would put him on the path of total recovery. But prelates close to Francisco are providing the possibility that their fragile state really is the new normality. They have described their physical weakness as a powerful moment of teaching on human dignity, and argue that their obvious lack of energy does not affect their authority, although it temporarily makes their active style of government more relaxed.
During the next two months, Francisco will be less visible, more difficult to hear, he will be more enclaustrated and more prone to sticking to the script. Experts and Vatican officials claim that these limitations will assume a challenge for Francisco, who, during the last decade, has made distant trips, physical closeness with believers, dramatic gestures and a casual style the distinctive marks of his pontificate.
Those angular stones of Francisco’s papacy will now be pause. The Vatican said on Thursday that Pope’s participation in Easter rites in a special jubilee year is uncertain, depending on his improvement.
Buckingham Palace announced that King Carlos III had postponed a visit to the Vatican, “since the Medical Council has now suggested that Pope Francis would benefit from a prolonged period of rest and recovery.” The papal agenda, before full of appearances, has given way to statements and written communications.
“Nothing will be as brilliant as before,” he said about the convalescence of Francisco Alberto Melloni, historian of the Catholic Church and director of the Juan XXIII Foundation for the religious sciences of Bologna.
Alfieri said he instructed the Pope to remain in his Vatican residence, which would be equipped with oxygen but without some other special equipment, and Francisco agreed. He asked him to avoid numerous groups and, above all, exposure to young children, for fear of a new infection.
During that time, it will take oral medications with the hope of definitively cureing your lung infection. He said the Pope could work, but that at the moment he should not make great efforts.
“His voice will be the one before,” as Francisco’s respiratory muscles are strengthened, said Alfieri. Anything could happen, given the age of the Pope and his disease history, he said. Francisco has had respiratory conditions throughout his life, including one that required the removal of part of a lung when he was young. But the doctor said he hoped that, over time, Francisco could increase his workload while his health allowed it.
Vatican analysts said that, although the Pope has been going unnoticed, he directs the church as before.
“He is able to send even from the bed,” said Sandro Magister, an experienced Vatican observer. “Knowing its character, it would react quite hard before any attempt to keep it, say, under control.”
Some allies of Francisco in the ecclesiastical hierarchy went further, and affirmed that his fragility was a new attribute that would allow him to embody his own teachings.
“People say they do not speak, that they do not talk to the mouth,” said Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, by presenting a summit on longevity in the Vatican. The Pope’s condition was equivalent to a “deafening voice” for the reality of human limits and the dignity of old age, he added. “We have to get out of a too functionalist mentality.”
The same was said two decades ago of Pope John Paul II when he deteriorated in view of the public, with the body hunched and trembling and his head inclined to the side. It is likely to become an increasingly common issue as potatoes, like everyone else, live more time, a social change that promoted this week’s Vatican summit about longevity.
Francisco’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, resigned at age 85, claiming his age and fragility, and then lived another decade.
Weeks after Francisco was about to die, his gradual improvement was a relief for his doctors and for the faithful Catholics.
Alfieri said that when the treatment began to work and the Pope’s health improved, so did his humor. He made his staff in charge of pizza for the hospital floor, and went out to the halls so that his fellow patients could see it and have a shared sensation of their common vulnerability.
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When it was time for Francisco to leave the hospital, and put on his room the White Sotana and the Solido, Alfieri was not only the Pope’s doctor.
“Seeing the Pope,” he said, “that he was dressed as a patient in pajamas, and then see him dressed again, it is certainly for a Catholic, a very large feeling.”