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 – made on Sunday by the medical team at the Sírio-Libanês hospital in São Paulo – was interrupted near the end by the president himself, who entered the room walking alongside the first lady, Rosângela da Silva, known as Janja.
Wearing a panama hat – “so you don’t see the dressing on my head” the president joked – Lula spoke for 13 minutes and, at one point, 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,” the president said, pausing to take a sip of water as the first lady affectionately touched his arm.
“I only became fully aware of the seriousness of what had happened to me after the surgery,” Lula said.
In the early hours of Tuesday, he 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 in the future.
Lula, 79, said he was still experiencing headaches from the emergency surgery 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 Brazilian president.
Although his discharge came earlier than expected – it was initially planned for Monday or Tuesday – Lula will not immediately return to the capital, Brasília. According to his medical team, 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, due to its longer duration, has been “prohibited until further notice”, said the president’s personal doctor, the cardiologist Dr Roberto Kalil Filho.
Journalists were not permitted to ask Lula questions, but in his impromptu speech he addressed the arrest on Saturday of one of the closest allies of the former president Jair Bolsonaro – ex-defence minister Gen Walter Braga Netto – who was detained by federal police in connection with an alleged plot to stage a military coup.
“As I know you’re going to ask,” said Lula, “what happened this week with the arrest warrant issued against Gen Braga, I’ll show that I have more patience and am a democrat. I believe he is entitled to the presumption of innocence, something I didn’t have,” said Lula, who spent 580 days in prison during his second term due to a conviction that was later annulled.
However, the president stressed that if the accusations were proven, “these individuals […] must be severely punished”. He added that it was unacceptable for “high-ranking military officers to plot the murder of a president, his vice-president, and a supreme court judge”, referring to what federal police claim was an assassination plan devised by Bolsonaro’s allies after his 2022 electoral defeat.
