Rome: The 88-year-old Pope Francis marked his first week in the hospital battling pneumonia in both lungs along with fungal infection, his medical team on Friday said Pope’s complex respiratory infection isn’t life-threatening, but he’s not out of danger.
Pope’s doctors delivered their first in-person update on the pope’s condition, saying he will remain in Gemelli hospital at least through next week. The pope is receiving occasional supplements of oxygen when he is in need of it and is responding to the strengthened drug therapy he is receiving, they said.
Dr Sergio Alfieri of Gemelli Hospital and Pope Francis’ personal physician, Dr Luigi Carbone, provided an update on the pope’s condition, stating he remains in good spirits. Alfieri shared that when he greeted the pope as “Holy Father” on Friday morning, Francis humorously responded by calling him “Holy Son.”
The pope suffered from a seasonal infection that has filled hospitals, but with a difference, Alfieri said.
“Other 88-year-old people generally stay at home and watch TV in a rocking chair. Do you know any other 88-year-olds who govern, let’s say, a state and is also the spiritual father of all Catholics in the world? He does not spare himself, because he is enormously generous, so he got tired,″ Alfieri said.
Carbone said that Francis was responding to the drug therapy that was “strengthened” after the pneumonia was diagnosed earlier this week. He is also fighting a multipronged infection of bacteria, virus and fungus in the respiratory tract. Doctors said there was no evidence the germs had entered his bloodstream, a condition known as sepsis that they said remains the biggest concern. Sepsis is a complication of an infection that can lead to organ failure and death.
Francis is receiving supplemental oxygen when he needs it through a nasal cannula, a thin flexible tube that delivers oxygen through the nose.
Francis was admitted to Gemelli hospital on Feb. 14 after a case of bronchitis worsened. Doctors first diagnosed the complex respiratory infection and then the onset of pneumonia in both lungs on top of chronic asthmatic bronchitis. They prescribed “absolute rest.”
As his hospital stay drags on, some of Francis’ cardinals have begun responding to the obvious question that is circulating: whether Francis might resign if he becomes irreversibly sick and unable to carry on. Francis has said he would consider it, after Pope Benedict XVI “opened the door” to popes retiring, but has shown no signs of stepping down and in fact has asserted recently that the job of pope is for life.