Hadassah: No immediate plans to move Sharon [pg. 5]

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
Hadassah-University Medical Center has no immediate plans to move Prime Minister Ariel Sharon back up to the seventh-floor neurosurgery intensive care unit from the isolation unit in the ground-floor general intensive care unit, where he has been treated for several weeks since undergoing colon surgery. He remains in serious but stable condition, according to the hospital's acting spokesman, Ron Krumer, but remains in a deep coma. There are also no immediate plans to transfer the prime minister to a rehabilitation hospital such as Beit Loewenstein in Ra'anana. "We are not keeping him here by force. He still needs the supportive services available in a general hospital," Krumer said. Sharon has been in a coma since his massive hemorrhagic stroke and brain surgery on January 4. On Thursday, two rehabilitation doctors and two nurses from Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer visited Sharon at Hadassah's request and spoke to his medical team. "We thought they might know something new that we have not tried, but they had nothing new to suggest," said Krumer. In the meantime, Hadassah has received "hundreds, maybe thousands" of proposals on how to wake Sharon up and improve his condition from some well-meaning doctors and many crackpots. "We throw those that are not serious into the wastebasket, and the ones that could be serious we send to the doctors," Krumer said. "There was one man who said he knew of a new treatment that has passed animal trials but had not yet reached clinical trials, and he volunteered to try it on his mother, who has been in a coma for nine months, if we didn't want to use it on Sharon first. We threw it in the wastebasket."