Montevideo, Uruguay.- Former Uruguayan President José Mujica, diagnosed with esophageal cancer in April, is “doing well” after undergoing surgery to ensure he can eat safely, his personal physician said Saturday.
Mujica underwent gastrostomy surgery to ensure that he can stay hydrated and fed, allowing the esophagus to repair itself naturally while this is going on, his doctor Raquel Pannone explained to the media.
“We are betting on keeping him better nourished, well hydrated and giving the esophagus time to complete the natural stages of recovery,” Pannone said, adding that it is not known how long this process will take. He explained that once this stage is over, the plan would be to return to a “normal” digestive process. The former president, 89, has been confined since Thursday in the Montevideo hospital of Casmu, his third admission in less than two weeks.
The doctor reiterated that the surgical procedure was carried out without complications and that Mujica is “well”, resting and “accompanied by Lucía” Topolansky (his partner), “calm and recovering.”
Pannone said earlier that Mujica was hospitalized due to digestive problems that led to dehydration and recalled that the discomfort felt by the former President is a consequence of the radiotherapy treatment he underwent to treat a malignant tumor in the esophagus, which ended up causing fibrosis. He clarified that, although he had previously said that there are “strong convictions that the cancer was cured,” at this time there is “clinical evidence” that he is in “a stage of remission due to the treatment.” “Definitive cure cannot be said yet at that time, what we do know is that there is no clinical evidence that (the tumor) is present,” he added. Mujica announced his own diagnosis at the end of April and, a week later, began treatment with daily radiotherapy sessions. The former guerrilla was in charge of Uruguay between 2010 and 2015. He retired from the Senate and from politics in 2020, although he never stopped advocating for the causes he defends and remained active in the ranks of the leftist Frente Amplio. His last public appearance was on August 27 at a political rally at his party’s headquarters, hours after he left the hospital.
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