President back home ‘before Christmas’

By Evie Andreou

IF ALL goes well, President Nicos Anastasiades will quickly recover from his heart mitral valve operation and should be back from New York before the Christmas holidays, his personal physicians said on Wednesday.

After the five-hour corrective surgery on Tuesday at Mount Sinai hospital, the president is expected to remain in the intensive care unit for the next 24 hours and to be discharged in about a week.

“The course of the progress of the condition of the health of the President, from the end of the surgical procedure he has undergone until now, is deemed by his physicians as very satisfactory and stable, and continues to improve,” government spokesman Nicos Christodoulides announced.

During the surgery, performed by mitral-valve expert Dr David Adams and his team, the president’s mitral and triglochin valves were repaired and his heart arrhythmias he had been experiencing for quite some time were regulated, said his personal physician Dr Marinos Soteriou who accompanied him to New York along with Dr. Savvas Kadis.

“He is being closely observed by his attending physicians until his condition is stabilised,” Kadis said.

The president’s personal physicians expressed their satisfaction with the surgery but remain cautious in their comments.

“For the moment, we must take one step at a time, to be able to shape a full image because in such cases, many things can happen,” Soteriou said.

He added that in case of heart surgeries, patients may develop various other conditions in different stages, like bleeding and infections.

A few days after his discharge, Kadis said, the president will have to return to hospital for some standard examinations and if all goes well he will be in a position to travel about three weeks after the surgery.

“It depends on how the whole process goes and we hope that there will be no problems,” spokesman Christodoulides added.

He said that during the president’s absence, the government is run by the head of parliament Yiannakis Omirou and that the only thing that has changed is the president’s scheduled visits abroad.

All the island’s political leaders wished the president a speedy recovery.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.