Pope Francis showed slight improvement on Monday, the Vatican said, adding that the pontiff’s condition remained critical.
On Monday afternoon the pope, 88, did some light work at the Rome’s hospital where he has spent the past 10 days with pneumonia, a complex infection and mild kidney insufficiency, that together had left him in critical condition, the Vatican said in a statement.
The Vatican said that Francis’ mild kidney insufficiency was not a cause for concern, that oxygen therapy continued, although with slightly reduced flow, and that some laboratory tests have improved. There had been no repeat of the “asthmatic respiratory crisis” that the pope experienced on Saturday, they said.
However, given the “complexity of the clinical picture,” the pope’s doctors were guarding his prognosis, meaning they were not issuing predictions about the likely outcome of the pope’s illness.
On Monday night, the Vatican summoned all the cardinals residing in Rome to St. Peter’s square to recite a rosary for the pontiff at 9 p.m. The Vatican’s secretary of state, Pietro Parolin, was scheduled to preside on the ceremony.
The Vatican said in a statement on Monday morning that for Francis, the night had gone well.
The pope was “alert and well oriented” and tests showed that his anemia had improved thanks to blood transfusions, the Vatican said, adding that Francis had called the parish priest of the parish of Gaza to express his closeness, after receiving a video from the parish.
Francis, who as a young man had part of a lung removed, has suffered a series of health conditions in recent years, but this is his longest hospitalization for a lung infection.
Sergio Alfieri, a surgeon who is on 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 older person hospitalized for pneumonia is in a risky situation from the start. The American Thoracic Society reports that pneumonia poses a greater risk of death in older patients than any other reason for hospitalization.
And kidney failure is a common and especially ominous sign in older people hospitalized with pneumonia, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco.
He added that an older patient hospitalized with pneumonia could develop kidney failure because of the pneumonia infection, which causes inflammation as the body tries to fight the disease, low blood pressure or low levels of oxygen in his blood. Some antibiotics can also affect kidney function.
But whatever the cause, the prognosis is poor. A recent study found that more than a third of hospitalized geriatric patients with pneumonia developed kidney failure, and that more than half of them died, as compared to similar patients whose kidneys did not fail.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, in his homily on Sunday at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, said that Francis was “in very, very fragile health and probably close to death,” as he urged the faithful to pray for the ailing pope.
Many around the world have gathered to pray for Francis, who is the spiritual leader of almost 1.4 billion Roman Catholics. From near the Policlinico Agostino Gemelli hospital in Rome, where the pope is being treated in a dedicated apartment for popes, to South Korea, to his native Argentina, the faithful have held vigils and prayers for the pontiff.
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