Pope Francis reached the three -week mark on Friday in his hospitalization for double pneumonia, in stable condition, receiving therapy but not necessarily improving, after giving the world a tangible indication of how fragile and sick he is.
Francis, 88, spent 20 minutes in the Chapel of the Gemelli Hospital, praying and doing a job between break and respiratory physiotherapy, said the Vatican. He was using high supplementary oxygen flows to help him breathe during the day and a non -invasive mechanical ventilation mask at night.
Doctors who are not involved in their attention said after three weeks of acute attention in the hospital for double pneumonia, they would have expected to have seen an improvement and warned that it was increasingly at risk of secondary infections the longer it remains hospitalized.
In addition, Francis has had acute respiratory insufficiency episodes earlier this week and underwent bronchoscopies to the suction mucus of his lungs.
“He has had respiratory failure and could not free him from the hospital in the first three weeks. And, therefore, I think I would say that this seems worrying, perhaps more worrying than at first, “said Dr. Andrew Chadwick, a specialist in respiratory care and intensive in hospitals at the University of Oxford in England.
Dr. Jeffrey Millstein, a clinical assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said it was not shocking that Francis had not improved in three weeks, and that he was an encouraging who could breathe part of the day with only a nasal tube of high flow oxygen. But he said that his condition was certainly “a kind of precarious, tactile and touch situation” and that recovery, although possible, would be a long process.
Get daily national news
Get the main news, political, economic and current headlines of the day, delivered to your entrance tray once a day.
In the future, “I just would not be looking for new setbacks,” he said. “I think that while being dealing with current problems and is only making incremental progress, that would be great.”
Francis offered a first public signal how weak is Thursday recording an audio message that was transmitted to the faithful in the Plaza de San Pedro who had gathered for the night recitation of the prayer of the Rosary.
In it, Francis thanked people for their prayers. But his voice was barely discernible through his labor breaths and spoke in his native Spanish, not Italian.
“I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your prayers for my health from the square, I accompany you from here,” he told the silent square. “May God bless you and the Virgin protects you. Thank you.”
The message served many purposes. It was the first public sign of the life of the Pope since he entered the Gemelli Hospital in Rome on February 14, and rested the right -wing conspiracy theories and the rumors of questioning his true medical state.
The Vatican said that Francisco himself wanted to record it, to thank all those people who had been praying for him. In his message on Sunday last weekend, Francis said he had felt the affection of so many people and felt “as if he were” taken “and supported by all the people of God.”
But the audio also stressed how weak it is Francis. For anyone he used to hear his voice, the message was an emotional blow to the instinct that hit home how difficult it is for him even breathe.
The Pope has a chronic lung disease and took part in a lung when he was young.
The Vatican has given updates twice a day on Francis's condition, but has not distributed photos or videos of him since the morning of February 14, when he occupied a handful of audiences in the Vatican before being admitted to the Gemelli hospital so it was only a bad case of bronchitis.
The infection progressed to a complex infection of the respiratory tract and double pneumonia that has set aside Francis during the longest period of his 12 -year -old papacy and raised questions about his papacy's future.
& Copy 2025 the Canadian press