News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Jan. 7, 2022: “Thank you all.” Those were the words Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, aka ‘The Trump of the Tropics,’ tweeted after being discharged from hospital Thursday.
He spent two days there after being admitted with an intestinal obstruction, his latest health complication from a 2018 stabbing on the campaign trial.
The president has recovered and is ready for work, his doctor, Antonio Macedo, told reporters. Bolsonaro will be on a special diet on weekends and will not be able to perform intense exercise, Macedo added.
“We instruct patients to chew well, avoid some foods, and we hope to keep the president like that for the next 20, 30 years,” Macedo told reporters in the lobby of Sao Paulo’s Vila Nova Star hospital.
Bolsonaro joked about the difficulty of the restrictions.
“I’ll try to follow them, but life goes on,” he said. “My whole life I was an athlete, in the armed forces, a paratrooper, diver. It’s hard to stay still.”
Bolsonaro, who has been in power since 2019 and plans to stand for re-election in a presidential vote scheduled for October, said he will maintain his regular agenda, including a trip to Russia in February.
He was vacationing in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina when he was urgently taken to the Sao Paulo hospital in the early hours of Monday after suffering from abdominal pain.
Doctors inserted a nasogastric tube and even considered surgery, but the obstruction was cleared on Tuesday. Bolsonaro has undergone a series of emergency surgeries since being knifed during a campaign event in September 2018.
