Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has been discharged from hospital after spending six days recovering from emergency surgery to drain a haematoma in his brain. The announcement was made on Sunday by the medical team at the Sírio-Libanês hospital in São Paulo, but was interrupted near the end by the president himself, who entered the room walking alongside the first lady, Rosângela da Silva.
Wearing a panama hat – “so you don’t see the dressing on my head,” the president joked – Lula spoke for 13 minutes and became emotional as he recalled the shock of discovering the haematoma, 52 days after a fall in the bathroom of the presidential residence on 19 October. “Since I thought I was already cured, I must admit I was a bit alarmed at how much [the haematoma] had grown and the amount of fluid in my head. I was worried,” he said.
In the early hours of Tuesday, Lula underwent a trepanation – a procedure in which a small hole is made in the skull to drain blood – and on Thursday had a non-surgical procedure known as a middle meningeal artery embolisation to reduce the risk of further bleeding. The 79-year-old said he was still experiencing headaches but felt well enough to return to work. “I feel fine, I’m calm, and you all know that I claim the right to live until I’m 120,” said the leftist, serving his third term as president.
Although his discharge came earlier than expected, Lula will not immediately return to the capital, Brasília. He will remain in São Paulo until at least Thursday, when he is due to undergo a follow-up CT scan. If the results are satisfactory, he may then take the roughly two-hour flight back to Brasília. However, international travel has been “prohibited until further notice”, said his personal doctor, cardiologist Roberto Kalil Filho.
In his impromptu speech, Lula addressed the arrest on Saturday of former defence minister Gen Walter Braga Netto, a close ally of ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, who was detained in connection with an alleged plot to stage a military coup. “I believe he is entitled to the presumption of innocence, something I didn’t have,” Lula said, referring to his own 580 days in prison on a conviction later annulled. He stressed that if the accusations were proven, “these individuals … must be severely punished”, adding that it was unacceptable for “high-ranking military officers to plot the murder of a president, his vice-president, and a supreme court judge”.
