The pope’s doctors did not think he would make it.
“It’s terrible”, Pope Francis went through a breathing crisis last month. The Pope, his hand bruises with needle stings and his saturation of oxygen that immerse themselves to a dangerously low 78 during his long hospitalization, recognized with a bankruptcy voice that could die. He held the doctor’s hand.
Francis had excluded intubation, which would have meant being unconscious, the leader of the medical team, said dr. Sergio Alfieri, in an interview. So his doctors decided to treat pneumonia in both lungs with a burst of drugs last speech that risked damaging his organs.
The closest helpers of the Pope had tears in their eyes while the doctors asked the Pope’s personal nurse, authorized to make life or death decisions, for the permission to move forward with more aggressive treatment. He agreed and, ultimately, the Pope replied positively.
Even so, the worst had not yet passed. Less than a week later, Francis rejected food and began to suffocate. The doctors, fearing they could die on the spot, immediately embraced his airways but worried that inhalation would aggravate his deeply infected lungs. His medical boss worried that everything was lost.
But it wasn’t.
Sunday 38 days after entering the hospital of Agostino Gemelli, dr. Alfieri has discharged the leader of the Roman Catholic Church to return to the Vatican. He implored his patient, who had resisted to go to the hospital in the first place, to rest and convalescence in order not to lose the possibility that he had been given to him.
“It was a miracle that left the hospital,” said dr. Alfieri, adding that the Pope now “was not in danger”.
But when Francis made a short appearance during the weekend, the public received a taste that makes the toll reflect that the health crisis had taken the 88 -year -old Pope. Greeting the supporters of a hospital balcony, his voice was so weak as to be in utusto, his breath so tense sometimes seemed to flee anxiously for the air.
“You can see the decline,” said Carlos Aguirre, a pilgrim from Colorado Springs as he looked at Francis to fight to speak.
Francis’s doctor said the Pope accepted a two -month convalescence that would put him on the road to full healing. But the prelates close to Francis are protecting from the possibility that his fragile state is truly the new normality. They depicted his physical weakness as a powerful moment of teaching on human dignity and have argued that his evident lack of energy has no influence on his authority, even if he temporarily loosened his practical governance style.
In the next two months, Francis will be less visible, more difficult to listen to, more cloister and more likely to stick to the script. The constraints, experts and Vatican officials will be a challenge for Francis, who, in the last dozens of years, has made distant trips, physical closeness to his flock, dramatic gestures and a free -wheel style the distinctive features of his pontificate.
Those milestones of the Papacy of Francis will now be waiting. The Vatican said Thursday that the Pope’s participation in Easter rites in a special Jubilee year is uncertain, depending on his improvement.
Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles III had postponed a visit to the Vatican, “as the medical council has now suggested that Pope Francis would benefit from a long period of rest and recovery”. A papal program once full of appearances has given way to written declarations and observations.
“Nothing will be as sparkling as before,” said Alberto Melloni, historian of the Church and director of the Giovanni XXIII Foundation for the religious sciences in Bologna, of the convalescence of Francis.
Dr. Alfieri claimed to have commissioned the Pope to maintain his Vatican residence, that he would be equipped with oxygen but no other special equipment, and Francis agreed. He implored the Pope to avoid large groups and in particular exposure to young children, for fear of new infections.
During that period, he will take oral drugs in the hope of definitively taking care of his lung infection. He said the Pope could work but should not practice excessively for the moment.
“His voice will return as before”, while the respiratory muscles of Francis are strengthened, said dr. Alfieri. Everything could happen given the age of the Pope and the history of the disease, he said: Francis had respiratory disorders for life, including one who required the removal of part of a lung when he was a young man. But the doctor said that he expected that Over time Francis could increase his workload as long as his health was held.
Vatican analysts said that while the Pope remained low, he manages the church as before.
“He is able to command a bed,” said Sandro Magister, a veteran observer of the Vatican. “Knowing his character, he would have reacted enough hard to any attempt to keep him, let’s say, under control.”
Some of the allies of Francis in the hierarchy of the church went further, saying that his fragility was a new attribute that would allow him to embody his teachings.
“People say they don’t speak, they don’t speak with their mouths,” said Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the pontifical academy for life, while introducing a summit on the 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 an excessively functionalist mentality.”
The same was said two decades ago of Pope John Paul II while he deteriorated in view of the public, his body curled up and trembled, his head collapsed on one side. It is likely that it will become an increasingly common theme because the popes, like everyone else, live longer, a social change that has pushed the Vatican summit this week on longevity.
Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, resigned at the age of 85, citing his age and fragility – and then lived another decade.
Weeks after Francis approached his death, his gradual improvement was a relief for his doctors and Roman Catholic faithful.
Dr. Alfieri said that when the treatment started working and the Pope’s health improved, his humor has also done. He had his staff to order the pizza for the hospital floor and went to theaters so that his patient companions could see him and have a shared sense of their common vulnerability.
When the moment came that Francis went, and changed to his room in his white and sodbase, Dr. Alfieri was not just the Pope’s doctor.
“Seeing the Pope,” he said, “who was dressed as a patient in pajamas, and then seeing him again dressed as Pope, it is certainly, for a Catholic, a huge feeling.”
Elisabetta Povoledo Reports contributed by Rome.