Ariel Sharon’s progress since his massive brain haemorrhage has stunned doctors, but the Israeli premier still faces a long and rocky road to recovery, his chief neurosurgeon said on Wednesday.
Despite growing hopes among supporters that Sharon might still be able to lead his new Kadima party into March elections, the Argentine surgeon stressed it could take months to know if he would fully recover his faculties.
”He is a very strong person. If someone had told me this was going to happen a week ago, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Felix Umansky in an interview.
Sharon, who is being gradually awoken from a medically induced coma, is already moving ”his four limbs” and showing stronger responses to the lightest stimulation, he said.
The 77-year-old premier is moving the right side of his body better than the left, but the left side ”is not paralysed”, he confirmed.
Medics have said only the right-hand side of Sharon’s brain, which controls the left side of his body, was affected in the brain haemorrhage and the latest movement may indicate he has retained more brain function than first thought.
”He is reacting better than yesterday [Tuesday] when we were pinching him or squeezing his fingertips. These are traditional neurological techniques,” Umansky said.
”Mozart is being played all day at a low volume in his room,” he added, explaining that doctors hoped the recordings of one of Sharon’s favourite composers will help stimulate his brain.
Umansky said the premier is continuing to breathe with the help of a ventilator, but that each time, he manages better on his own.
”The next step, which will make us very happy, is that he opens his eyes,” he said, without predicting when that might happen.
However, when a coma patient opens his eyes, it does not necessarily mean he is conscious, that he can see or that he is taking in what is going on around him, Umansky cautioned.
He said it is important that Sharon be weaned off sedation gradually.
”The process is very slow and must be very well controlled. Nobody who is close to regaining consciousness likes feeling that he has a tube next to his windpipe or that he is immobilised.
”This [process of awakening him] raises the blood pressure and it is important to go slowly.”
For days, doctors have doubted Sharon can again lead the country, leaving Israel staring into a political void just more than two months before a general election that the prime minister’s Kadima party had been tipped to win.
However, the more upbeat news emerging from Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital where Sharon is being treated in Jerusalem has prompted some of the premier’s allies to suggest he could lead Kadima into the March 28 parliamentary election.
But Umansky warned that it is still not possible to evaluate the damage caused by the stroke to Sharon’s brain or its impact on his cognitive and motor functions, and that doctors might not be able to do so before the vote.
”To evaluate his higher intellectual functions could take weeks or months, although other functions such as speaking will occur earlier.”
The surgeon said Sharon, who weighed about 115kg before his collapse, is surprisingly strong for someone of his age and weight with no trace of diabetes and enviable blood pressure.
But he stressed that while Sharon is out of immediate danger, it is impossible to rule out deterioration further down the line.
”When a person is unconscious through illness or through an induced coma, he is always exposed to complications, and above all infections,” the neurosurgeon warned. — AFP
