Cuban President Fidel Castro directed his surgeons to pursue the riskier option of surgery rather than performing a colostomy that would have forced him to be dependent on a bag for bodily functions, according to new details published in a Spanish newspaper.
The operation failed when a suture burst, leaving Castro gravely ill, El Pais newspaper reported on Wednesday. Cuban officials have denied the account.
After removing an inflamed piece of Castro's large intestine in an operation last year, the doctors connected the remainder directly to his rectum, rather than attaching a colostomy bag, El Pais said, quoting two medical sources at Madrid's Gregorio Maranon hospital. The operation failed when the suture burst.
"The Cuban dictator and his advisers are the ones who decided on the surgical technique that has led to the complications," the paper said.
Experts say that it's possible Castro and his surgeons went for the riskier procedure to spare him the indignity of being temporarily attached to a colostomy bag for waste removal. In standard colostomies, patients are only dependent on such bags for approximately six weeks.
Attempting to reattach the colon to the rectum is an inherently trickier surgical procedure, since waste from the colon can leak out into the abdomen, causing infection.
"It sounds like they took a gamble and they lost," said Peter Shamanian, an associate professor of surgery at New York University School of Medicine, referring to Castro's surgeons.
Though Shamanian said it is difficult to speculate on Castro's condition, he said colostomies are a standard procedure that do not usually result in serious complications. Most physicians, he said, would probably opt for a colostomy in the first instance.
"It's always a bad idea to let the patient make the choice," he said.
While the newspaper article did not name the sources, one of the journalists who wrote it said that both were doctors at the hospital. The journalist, Oriol Guell, said none of the information in the articles published on Tuesday and Wednesday came from surgeon Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido, who works at the hospital and flew to Cuba last month to treat the 80-year-old Castro.
Garcia Sabrido, the Madrid hospital's chief surgeon, said the El Pais account of Castro's condition as being grave was wrong, according to an interview posted on CNN's Web site.
"The only truthful parts of the newspaper's reports are the name of the patient, that he has been operated on, and that he has had complications. The rest is rumors," Sabrido was quoted as saying.
He declined to give details on Castro's condition, according to the interview.
A Cuban diplomat in Madrid said on Tuesday that the newspaper's report on Castro's health was "an invented story."
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS