President Lula during a public event on the 22nd in Brasilia.ADRIANO MACHADO (Portal)
This Friday morning, the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 77, was admitted to a hospital in Brasilia for a planned operation. Doctors will put a prosthesis in his right hip because he suffers from advanced osteoarthritis, which has caused him severe pain since the election campaign more than a year ago. The procedure is performed under general anesthesia and is expected to take approximately two to three hours. However, the president did not delegate authority to his vice president Geraldo Alckmin. This is the second operation he has undergone since winning the election. Last November, he had a benign lump in his neck removed.
Lula is generally in good health, considering his age and the fact that he was already in his 70s when he spent a year and a half in prison. In addition, in 2011, shortly after leaving power after his second term, he suffered from throat cancer, which forced him to undergo harsh chemotherapy and radiation treatments. The voice, which is one of his trademarks, is also one of his weak points.
Lula will undergo surgery at the headquarters of the private hospital center in Brasilia, which has been taking care of his health for years. Part of the Syrian-Lebanese doctors who will treat him during the operation and in the postoperative period traveled this Thursday from São Paulo to the capital. The politician has worn a mask at all public events in recent days to prevent premature infection from thwarting the procedure.
As soon as he leaves the operating room, he will be transferred to an intensive care unit, where he will probably be able to use a walker for the first time after a few hours. The prognosis is that he will be released next Tuesday. And then about three weeks of recovery at his official residence, the Alvorada Palace.
President Lula’s delegation arrives this Friday morning at the Syrian-Lebanese hospital in Brasilia, where the politician will undergo hip surgery. ADRIANO MACHADO (Portal)
It was Lula himself who carefully chose the date of this new surgical procedure, whose recovery requires a certain level of calm that was incompatible with the intense agenda he had outlined for the start of his third term. The international travel that characterized these months is over for a season. He has traveled abroad more than within Brazilian borders. During the trip that took him to New York this month to attend the United Nations General Assembly, pain forced him to change his schedule. He reduced travel to a minimum and welcomed visitors to the hotel.
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“I have to be a little careful because the operation seems simple, but physiotherapy and treatment are essential for recovery,” the veteran politician explained in an interview last Tuesday. It is planned that he will not resume his international agenda until the end of November, when he wants to travel to the Cop28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates.
The president also recently admitted that he thought about having an operation immediately after his election victory, but rejected the idea: “I’ve been suffering from this pain since August.” He revealed that he still jumped on stage at campaign events, because he has to encourage people. And he confessed why he decided to leave the operating room for the time being: “I thought that if I had an operation right after the elections, people would say: ‘Lula is old, he won the elections and is already in the hospital. ‘“
Over the next few weeks, Lula, who will leave the hospital in a wheelchair, will need a walker and then a crutch. But in controversial statements, he announced that his official photographer Ricardo Stöckert, the man who has shaped his public image for years, would not take pictures of him with any of these devices. “You won’t see me with a walker or crutches, you’ll always see me looking good, like I haven’t even had surgery,” he said in the weekly interview in which he brags about his achievements. These words hit him like a boomerang, as criticism of institutions that promote the integration of people with disabilities.
Among the angry was Ivan Baron, a young activist with cerebral palsy due to meningitis, who accompanied Lula, dressed in an elegant suit and leaning on his cane, along with other Brazilian citizens, at the symbolic moment of entering the presidential palace on January 1st. , after taking possession. Baron further replied “It means our bodies are flawed or incomplete.” He added that such statements reinforce prejudices.