ILLNESS: Mother Teresa’s Ailment Life-Threatening : Mother Teresa’s Illness Is Termed Life-Threatening

Physicians treating Mother Teresa said Tuesday that the missionary nun’s health is unimproved, and they are “very concerned about her prognosis.”

In Tijuana, nuns have been eating only bread and water at night as a special devotion for Mother Teresa’s recovery, and monks at her order’s seminary there were taking turns in an around-the-clock prayer vigil.

At a briefing at Scripps Clinic & Research Foundation, the two doctors treating the 81-year-old Nobel Prize winner said the treatment for her bacterial pneumonia has had little effect so far.

Although procedures to treat congestive heart failure brought on by the pneumonia have been successful, they said the medical regimen required to reduce the risk of heart attack has its own risks that could lead to internal bleeding or a stroke.

“She has a life-threatening illness,” said Dr. Paul Teirstein, director of interventional cardiology at Scripps. “We hope she responds to the treatment, but time will tell.

“Pneumonia takes a while to clear, particularly if you’re 81 years old,” Teirstein said. “She appeared to have a bit of response (to antibiotics) but it’s too early to tell. At her age, she can go up or down. She can have setbacks.”

But Mother Teresa’s physicians and friends said the woman, known as the “Saint of the Gutters” for her work in the slums of Calcutta, remains in good spirits and is a bit taken aback by all the attention.

“She’s very grateful, but she’s apologetic for all the trouble she’s causing,” said Dr. Anita Figueredo, a longtime friend of Mother Teresa who has seen her daily since her hospitalization Thursday.

“She has utter trust in God, and is accepting of what He may choose to do with her,” Figueredo said. “She’s a very good patient, but she doesn’t see the point of it all. She says, if God wants her to stay, fine, but if He’s through with her, that’s fine too. Her personal health and well-being is not terribly important to her.”

Figueredo said Mother Teresa is “resigned . . . but hasn’t given up in any sense. And she’s marveled at all the concern people have.”

Among those who have contacted Mother Teresa is Pope John Paul, who called her at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, Figueredo said.

“That really picked her up,” Figueredo said. “I don’t know what he said, but I suspect he laid down the law with her, to take care of herself.”

Teirstein said his patient seemed surprised by all the commotion over her. “We had to obtain numerous signatures on consent forms . . . and her response was, ‘So many signatures for such a small heart.’ ”

Dr. Patricia Aubanel, who has treated members of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity community in Tijuana and who admitted the nun to Scripps last week, said her patient usually clutches her rosary beads and “is praying, praying, praying, praying.”

Since the weekend news that Mother Teresa’s health took a turn for the worse, seminarians and nuns have held 24-hour prayer vigils at the five religious communities operated in Tijuana by the Missionaries of Charity.

Tijuana has a special bond with Mother Teresa; she was hailed two weeks ago when she chose to end her worldwide tour in the border city on the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint.

“At mealtimes, all of the migrants and the others have been praying for her,” said Arturo Jimenez, a volunteer at the order’s Beato Juan Diego shelter near the city bus station, where migrants and destitute elderly people receive food and shelter each night.

“The nuns are praying for her constantly,” Jimenez said. “They have been asked by the Mother Superior to eat only one meal a day, with bread and water at night, as a special devotion that Mother Teresa get better.”

Several blocks away in the Missionaries of Charity seminary, a solitary monk knelt in prayer in an adobe chapel decorated with a holiday Nativity scene.

Occasionally, airplanes would rumble over the working-class neighborhood of dirt roads and ramshackle houses. Another monk studied a piece of paper with a handwritten schedule for the young seminarians who have been praying for Mother Teresa in hourly shifts around-the-clock.

The vigil was joined periodically by people from the neighborhood.

Seamstress Guadalupe Luna, a bespectacled woman in a red sweater, removed her shoes before entering the small prayer area in the back of the chapel and knelt beneath a large cross.

“People in the neighborhood are worried,” said Luna’s 17-year-old niece, factory worker Hilda Talamantes, before joining her aunt in the chapel. “Mother Teresa has always been frail. I think she’s sick now because of her age, and because she has worked so hard taking care of all of us all of these years.”

Doctors Aubanel and Teirstein said Mother Teresa first showed flu-like symptoms during her stay in Tijuana, which was the last stop on her worldwide visits to the communities she has founded.

Mother Teresa first resisted medical treatment, Aubanel said. “It’s difficult to say how long the problem had been going on . . . but it became worse and deteriorated into pneumonia,” she said.

Mother Teresa had had previous episodes of pneumonia, but this was a more serious malady that reduced the flow of oxygen to her heart and led to congestive heart failure.

“She had an underlying problem with her heart, and the pneumonia stressed her system so that her heart disease became more important,” Teirstein said.

The heart’s weakened pumping ability in turn caused more fluid to accumulate in the lungs, worsening the pneumonia in a sort of vicious circle, the doctors said. The greater priority, they said, was to treat the heart problem.

On Sunday, Mother Teresa underwent angioplasty in which a small balloon device was threaded into the arteries leading to her heart so they could be enlarged in several places, thereby increasing the flow of oxygen to her heart.

In one instance, though, the treatment did not help and a stent--a thin, cylindrical, slotted tube--was expanded in the vessel, creating a scaffolding of sorts to hold the artery open. That treatment was totally successful, Teirstein said.

But one of the concerns in the use of a stent is that blood might clot on its stainless-steel mesh, then loosen and travel to the heart, resulting in a heart attack. To prevent clotting, Mother Teresa will be given blood-thinning medicines for four weeks--a regimen that creates its own concerns because thinned blood could lead to internal bleeding in the lungs or the brain, causing a stroke.

In any event, there is a 25% to 30% chance that Mother Teresa will be a candidate for another angioplasty--or perhaps heart surgery--within six months, Teirstein said.

All the while, Mother Teresa is “very comfortable, very alert, responsive. At times she gets tired but for the most part she is very cheerful.”

Hospital officials said several nuns from the Missionaries of Charity community in Tijuana have maintained a bedside vigil with her, and that she has received notes and telephone calls from leaders around the world wishing her well.

Hospital authorities ask, though, that the public refrain from sending her flowers because she remains in intensive care.