Pope Francis was resting on Monday at the hospital in Rome where he spent the last 10 days with pneumonia, a complex infection and now kidney problems that have left him all in critical conditions, said the Vatican.
The Vatican declared in a statement on Monday morning that “the night went well, the Pope slept and now he is resting”, but he has not provided more information on the health of the 88 -year -old pontiff.
The officials had to update on his condition on Monday evening, a day after the Vatican said he also suffered from “initial and mild renal failure”.
At the moment, kidney problems are “under control”, said the Vatican. The “asthmatic respiratory crisis” that the Pope lived on Saturday, said, did not repeat.
The pope was “attentive and well -oriented” and the tests showed that his anemia had improved thanks to blood transfusions, said the Vatican, adding that he was still receiving high supplementary oxygen flows.
Francis, who was part of a removed lung as a young man, has undergone a series of health conditions in recent years, but this is his longest hospitalization for a lung infection.
Sergio Alfieri, a surgeon who is part of the Pope’s medical team, said on Friday that the Pope had told him that he was aware of his own fragility and that “both doors are open”.
An elderly person hospitalized for pneumonia is in a risky situation from the beginning. The American Thoracic Society reports that pneumonia gives a greater risk of death in older patients than any other reason for hospitalization.
And kidney failure is a common and particularly threatening sign in the elderly hospitalized in hospital with pneumonia, said dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an expert in infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco.
He added that an older patient hospitalized with pneumonia could develop renal failure due to pneumonia infection, which causes inflammation while the body tries to combat disease, or low blood pressure or low levels of oxygen in the blood. Some antibiotics can also affect kidney function.
But whatever the cause, the prognosis is poor. A recent study discovered that over a third of the geriatric patients hospitalized with pneumonia has developed kidney failure and that over half of them died, compared to similar patients whose kidneys have not failed.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in his homily on Sunday in the cathedral of San Patrizio in New York, said that Francis was “very fragile healthy and probably close to death”, while he urged the faithful to pray for the sick Pope.
Many all over the world have gathered to pray for Francis, who is the spiritual leader of almost 1.4 billion Roman Catholics. From the neighbor to the Polyclinic Agostino Gemelli Hospital in Rome, where the Pope is treated in a dedicated apartment for the Popes, to South Korea, to his Argentine native, the faithful have kept vigils and prayers for the pontiff.