“I did not respond to the stimuli, not even the painful ones. At that time I realized that I could not do anything else. I was in a coma,” Alfieri explains in statements published in the Italian media.
He revealed that “if he had lost his knowledge” he would have “had to follow the guidelines of his health assistant, Massimiliano Strappetti, who was like a son for the Holy Father” and that they were “no therapeutic teaching.”
“During his last hospitalization he expressly requested that he did not proceed in any case to intubation,” that “he would have helped him breathe, but it would have been difficult to go back and extend him, with the infected virus lungs,” he explained.
The one who was also his surgeon in two operations explained: “On Monday around 5.30 in the morning I received a call from Strappetti: the Holy Father is very sick we have to return to the Gemelli. I notice all and twenty minutes later I was there in Santa Marta, it seemed difficult to think that an income was necessary.”
“We ran the risk of dying on the transfer, I explained that hospitalization would have been useless. Strappetti knew that the Pope wanted to die at home, he always said it when we were in the Gemelli. He died shortly after, ”Alfieri recalled.
In another interview he said that “he never exposed to danger.”
“It’s as if, approaching the end, I had decided to do what I had to do. As happened on Resurrection Sunday,” when he accepted the proposal of his personal assistant Massimiliano Strappetti to turn around the square between the crowd, “he adds.
On the cause of death, Alfieri explained that “It was one of those infarctions that take you in an hour, perhaps a plunger began and a blood vessel of the brain. Maybe there was bleeding. They are events that can happen to anyone, but the elderly run more risk, especially if they move little. ”
According to the death part, signed by the Director of Health and Hygiene of the State of the city of the Vatican, Andrea Arcangeli, death was recorded at 7.35 local hours of April 21 in his apartment, the Vatican Residence Casa Santa Marta, for a stroke, which resulted in a comma and then a cardiocirculatory arrest. EFE