At a time when antibiotics were not as readily available, the teenaged Jorge Bergoglio—now the 76-year-old Pope Francis—had a lung removed due to infection, reports NBC News and the Associated Press.
“It was probably a pretty bad infection, and maybe even an abscess, that might have caused him to bleed,” Dr. John Belperio, association professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California Los Angeles, told Time magazine. “If he were bleeding a lot in the lung, the only thing to do is to resect the lung, take it out, to stop the bleeding.”
When Pope Benedict XVI resigned in February, citing health problems and age, many expected a more youthful pope and overlooked Bergoglio as a viable candidate. Doctors say, however, that having one lung is no reason to fear poor health.
“Without seeing and testing him, I would comfortably say he functions at 85 to 90 percent capacity of someone his age that has both lungs and hasn’t taken such good care of himself,” Dr. Zab Mosenifar, a lung expert at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, told NBC. “It just didn’t faze me.”
Dr. Edward Salerno, a pulmonologist with Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Conn., agreed. He told NBC that many people with one lung live healthy, and even active, lives.
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