For the first time there is a direct testimony these days of a person who has seen the Pope at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, where he is admitted since Friday: the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has visited it on Wednesday and has transmitted a positive sensation . “I am very happy to have found him alert and awake [reattivo, en italiano]. We have joked as always. He has not lost his proverbial sense of humor, ”he said in a statement from Palazzo Chigi, headquarters of the presidency of the Government, released at four in the afternoon.
Meloni’s statements have contributed to calm the spirits. These are hours of desire and concern in Rome, also of many rumors of all kinds, for the health of Pope Francis, 88, after Tuesday it was revealed that his illness, initially a bronchitis that led to entering him on February 14 Bilateral, in both lungs.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, on his sixth hospital at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, is before “a complex clinical picture”, but the Vatican tried to reduce the apprehension on Tuesday, adding at the end of his statement that, anyway, “the Pope It is in a good mood. ” To highlight that it is not unconscious, only convalescent, and responds to therapy. Italian media also assure that sometimes it has risen and sat in a armchair.
Already at 8.30 am today a simple statement has been issued that aims to convey some serenity: “The Pope has passed a quiet night, has woken up and breakfast.” That is, it rests normally and feeds autonomously. It is expected that the Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, to give some more information to the media throughout the morning, but a medical part as such will only disseminate in the afternoon, around seven o’clock.
These days the Vatican has repeated that the pontiff is dedicated to reading and even works. It has also transpired that it makes some phone calls. A reflection of their activity is that several appointments and decisions that require your signature have been made public. It is an important sign that he continues to rule from the hospital, something relevant to banish any hypothesis of a resignation, possibility that Bergoglio has always said that he would study in case of not being able to continue, as his predecessor, Benedict XVI, did in 2013, in 2013 .
To understand the situation, it is almost more practical to be a doctor than a journalist, and the best Italian specialists are giving their opinion, obviously with the information available. In general, the impression is that the state of the pontiff is delicate, at 88, but that with adequate therapy and good doctors it has a chance of getting ahead, except for complications that can always arise, being its age a risk factor. The next few hours will be decisive to know if drugs are working and lung infection remains at bay.
“The fact that the Pope seems to have no fever and continue working is a good sign. They are elements that allow us to understand that the body is reacting well to the cures provided, and also the cardiocirculatory apparatus seems complete, ”he explained to Republic Massimo Andreoni, scientific director of the Italian society of infectious diseases. That is, it indicates that Bergoglio’s heart seems strong and endures well. Andreoni confirms that hospitalization will be long, because treatment requires many days. “We will have a clearer evolution of the clinical picture in the next few hours, when the effect of therapy is better understood,” he concludes.
He has also drawn a scenario that allows the hope Antonio Spadaro, Jesuit and good friend of the Pope, well informed, who in an interview this Wednesday in the Corriere della Sera It foresees a minimum hospitalization of “two or three weeks”: “He is an 88 -year -old man who has had a serious problem, but now he is in the treatment phase. A treatment that is not simple, of course, that will take time. There is great attention, as is natural, and it is evident that the situation is delicate, but it does not seem to have perceived any form of alarmism. ”
A bronchitis dragged for too many days
It is quite unanimous the feeling that and in part it could have been avoided, by the allergy of Bergoglio to the doctors and their advice. He is weak of the lungs, and with 21 years they removed the upper part of the right lung. Since 2023 he always remedied or has bronchitis as soon as the cold arrives. This time he dragged bronchitis for 10 days, without heating well or wanting to stop working. He even presided over the outdoor mass in San Pedro, with an intense cold, on Sunday, February 9, when it was hard for him to speak. Finally, to heal.
In the hospital they determined a “polymicrobial infection” on the respiratory tract, that is, both viruses and bacteria, and doctors have been testing antibiotics; up to two different therapies. It could have worked and has remained without a fever, according to the Vatican information. The concrete picture is bronchiectasia, inflammation of the bronchi, and asthmatic bronchitis, which causes breathing problems. For this, cortisone applies, with the problem that the defenses lower.
The risk was that bronchitis derived from something more serious, pneumonia, which means that infection reaches the lungs in depth. And that’s what a TAC confirmed [tomografía axial computarizada] This Tuesday. Which added a new pharmacological therapy. Now the results must be expected.
Sergio Harari, director of the Pneumology Unit of the Multimedica Hospital of Milan, explained in the media that the fact of having detected pneumonia in time, in its initial phase, is positive: “You cannot know how much it will affect the lung in The future. The evolution, severe or soft, cannot be known in advance, you have to wait. ” The risks in the worst scenario are that the picture degenerates into acute respiratory failure or that the infection extends to the rest of the organism through blood flow.
