Health update on Archbishop Hannan

Archbishop Hannan hospitalized for shortness of breath; may be released Tuesday

Published: Monday, December 20, 2010

By Martha Carr, The Times-Picayune

Retired Archbishop Philip Hannan is expected to be released from a hospital Tuesday, weak but apparently free of pneumonia that threatened him for a week, Archbishop Gregory Aymond said Monday.

Hannan was admitted to the unidentified hospital Sunday night with difficulty breathing.

He was expected to be released after treatment, perhaps late Monday but probably Tuesday.

“The pneumonia is cured,” said Aymond, who is receiving updates on Hannan’s condition. But he stressed that Hannan is "very weak."

Aymond said Hannan’s respiratory distress was not from active pneumonia, but the result of residual fluids in his lungs from the infection, his age, and a week’s inactivity in bed.

That said, “He is not in congestive heart failure,” Aymond said.

“He has the heart of a 97-year-old, but it’s not diseased.”

Hannan has been bedridden since at least Dec. 12, first with a bronchial infection and then with pneumonia.

Until yesterday, he had preferred to stay at his home in Covington, receiving medical care there.

But on Sunday night Hannan asked to be taken to the hospital for relief of his respiratory distress, said Sarah Comiskey MacDonald, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese.

Contacted in Washington, D.C., Hannan’s brother, Jerry, was consulted and concurred, she said.

Until Sunday, Hannan was confined to the bed in which he and siblings were born in Washington D.C.

It is the same bed in which Pope John Paul II slept during his three-night visit to New Orleans in 1987.

Aymond asked for the community’s continued prayers.