Mother Teresa Impresses Doctors in Treadmill Run

Doctors treating Mother Teresa of Calcutta said Thursday that they are ecstatic with the Catholic missionary’s recovery from congestive heart failure, after the 81-year-old woman underwent a treadmill test at Scripps Clinic & Research Foundation in La Jolla.

“She ran . . . well, jogged . . . no, she ran on the treadmill for seven minutes, and she had an excellent response,” said a jubilant Dr. Paul Tierstein, a cardiologist at Scripps. “There was no evidence of any problem with the arteries that supply blood to her heart.”

Mother Teresa was admitted to Scripps on Dec. 26 for pneumonia she contracted while visiting her Missionaries of Charity community in Tijuana. The pneumonia weakened her heart and led doctors to perform an angioplasty to enlarge her arteries.

Tierstein said Mother Teresa may still require a follow-up angioplasty procedure for one of her arteries, and said she will be rechecked in six months.

He said Mother Teresa, who has been active in Tijuana since her release from Scripps on Jan. 15, will leave Sunday for New York and travel to Rome the next day for a week’s stay. She will then return to Calcutta, where the Nobel Peace Prize laureate earned the title “the saint of the gutters” for her work in the slums there.

“She feels great that she’s back to her normal self. She’s happy, and when she was running on the treadmill she was smiling,” Tierstein said.