Former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has been transferred to a regular room after spending over 24 hours in the intensive care unit of St. Luke’s Medical Center in Global City, a hospital official said.
Marilen Lagniton, vice president for customer affairs, told the Inquirer over the phone that Arroyo, now a Pampanga representative, was moved Sunday morning to a regular room where she is being closely monitored after undergoing spine surgery.
Lagniton declined to elaborate on Arroyo’s condition, saying that her doctors would issue a medical bulletin on Monday morning.
The transfer to a regular room would indicate Arroyo was recovering well, which her medical team reported on Friday night.
In a medical briefing Friday, her main attending physician, Dr. Juliet Gopez-Cervantes, said Arroyo’s confinement in the ICU was part of hospital protocol, especially since she had gone through a delicate operation.
Doctors corrected through surgery a portion of Arroyo’s spine in her neck, which had become misaligned. They attached a titanium plate to four levels of her spine to treat her condition called cervical spondylosis, an otherwise common age-related deterioration of the bones.
Her condition was described as sensitive because the misalignment was putting pressure on her nerves that transmit signals from her brain to her upper limbs. If not corrected, it could lead to paralysis, the doctors said.
Prior to the operation, Arroyo had been undergoing therapy and taking medication to address the pain in her neck, which doctors said she had been suffering from for at least eight years.
But on Monday afternoon last week, a pain attack forced the former president to seek treatment at the hospital, where her doctors decided to operate after evaluating her condition.
The five-hour operation Friday morning freed up the nerves in her neck, and the results were manifested later in the day when the doctors saw that Arroyo had regained full use of both her arms, which had been considerably weak when she was admitted to the hospital.
Earlier that day, Arroyo attended the opening session of Congress, but skipped President Aquino’s State of the Nation Address to be with her constituents in Pampanga.