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Sharon 'out of danger' after surgery
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-02-12 09:05
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, comatose since a stroke last month,
underwent emergency surgery to remove parts of a damaged intestine on Saturday
and a hospital official said he was out of immediate danger.
Shlomo Mor-Yosef, director of Hadassah Hospital, said that while the surgery
went well, Sharon's main problem remained his continuing state of
unconsciousness and "the dramatic event this morning will not help him recover
and is not a good sign."
Medical experts hold little hope for the 77-year-old leader's recovery after
a massive brain hemorrhage on January 4. He has been in a coma since the stroke.
Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon looks at his watch as he attends a session of the
Knesset in Jerusalem in this July 12, 2004 file photo. Sharon,
incapacitated by a January 4 stroke, underwent emergency surgery on
February 11, 2006 for digestive complications, Jerusalem's Hadassah
hospital said. [Reuters] | "The condition of Prime
Minister Sharon is stable but critical," Mor-Yosef told reporters after the
four-hour operation. "In the morning, there was really immediate danger to his
life, but now ... (there is) no immediate danger."
Sharon was rushed to the operating theater after a CT scan revealed
intestinal damage stemming from reduced blood flow that caused tissue to die.
"We removed 50 centimeters from his bowel, or 20 inches," Mor-Yosef said.
Earlier, a hospital source said doctors did not expect Sharon to survive the
day and a hospital spokeswoman described his condition as the most critical
since admission.
Sharon's death would almost certainly leave Ehud Olmert, named interim prime
minister after Sharon's brain hemorrhage last month, in charge until elections
in six weeks.
Olmert has stepped swiftly into the shoes of the former general who dominated
the Middle East scene for decades, pledging to press ahead with Sharon's tough
security policies and threatening to set Israel's final borders unilaterally if
peacemaking with the Palestinians remained frozen.
Opinion polls predict the centrist Kadima party, which Sharon founded after a
rebellion in his right-wing Likud over Israel's Gaza pullout last summer, will
easily win the March 28 general election with Olmert at its helm.
Government officials said Olmert was being kept up to date on Sharon's
condition and family members and a clutch of senior advisers rushed to the
hospital.
MEDICAL COMA
After suffering his massive stroke, Sharon was put into a medically induced
coma. Doctors have failed to rouse him.
Earlier this month they inserted a feeding tube in his stomach in preparation
for possible transfer to a long-term care facility, underscoring medical
experts' view that he would never recover.
Long reviled in the Arab world but increasingly regarded as a peacemaker by
the West, Sharon suffered his stroke at a crucial juncture in Israeli politics,
as he was fighting for re-election on a promise to end conflict with the
Palestinians.
In recent years, he has voiced support for a Palestinian state but demanded
the disarming of Palestinian militant groups before he would resume peace talks.
Olmert has hammered home that demand, part of a U.S.-backed peace "road map"
that also calls on Israel to stop Jewish settlement expansion, with added force
since the Islamic militant group Hamas won the January 25 Palestinian election.
Sharon suffered his stroke a day before he was to check into Hadassah
Hospital for a procedure to correct a tiny defect in his heart that was said to
have contributed to a mild stroke he suffered two weeks earlier.
Doctors had treated Sharon with blood thinners before
the planned heart operation, and some in the medical community have questioned
the wisdom of such treatment because Sharon's second stroke was caused by
massive bleeding in the brain.
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