Pope Francis marks 3 weeks in hospital with no signs of recovery

The 88-year-old Francis spent 20 minutes in the Gemelli hospital chapel, praying and doing some work in between rest and respiratory and physical therapy, the Vatican said.

Pope Francis hit the three-week mark Friday in his hospitalization for double pneumonia, in stable condition, receiving therapy but not necessarily improving, after giving the world a tangible indication of just how frail and sick he is.

The 88-year-old Francis spent 20 minutes in the Gemelli hospital chapel, praying and doing some work in between rest and respiratory and physical therapy, the Vatican said. He was using high flows of supplemental oxygen to help him breathe during the day and a noninvasive mechanical ventilation mask at night.

Doctors not involved in his care said after three weeks of acute care in the hospital for double pneumonia, they would have hoped to have seen improvement and warned that he was increasingly at risk of secondary infections the longer he remains hospitalized.

Additionally, Francis has had episodes of acute respiratory failure earlier this week and underwent bronchoscopies to suction mucus from his lungs.

“He’s had respiratory failure and they were not able to liberate him from the hospital in the first three weeks. And therefore I think you’d say this does look concerning, perhaps more concerning than it did right at the beginning,” said Dr. Andrew Chadwick, a respiratory and intensive care specialist at Oxford University Hospitals in England.

Dr. Jeffrey Millstein, a clinical assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said it wasn’t shocking that Francis hadn’t improved in three weeks, and that it was encouraging he was able to breathe part of the day with just a nasal tube of high-flow oxygen. But he said that his condition certainly was “a precarious, touch and go kind of situation” and that recovery, while still possible, would be a long process.

Going forward, “I just would be looking for no new setbacks,” he said. “I think as long as he is dealing with the current issues and he’s just making incremental progress, that would be great.”

Francis offered a first public sign of just how weak he is on Thursday by recording an audio message that was broadcast to the faithful in St. Peter’s Square who had gathered for the nightly recitation of the rosary prayer.