GMA vows she’ll get more rest

President Arroyo has promised her doctors she would get more rest at Malacañang after her discharge from the St. Luke’s Medical Center (SLMC) in Quezon City yesterday, a Palace official said.

"She’s taking the entire weekend off," Presidential Management Staff chief Arthur Yap said. "There are no official functions. She’ll be back to work on Monday."

Yap said the President will limit her official engagements in the coming days to between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. and will attend only "very light sessions" before or after that period to ensure that she has time to rest.

Officials will also consult doctors ahead of planned trips outside Manila, he added.

Mrs. Arroyo, 59, was confined for two days at SLMC for influenza. Her symptoms included a fever, runny nose, cough, sore throat and muscle pains when she was brought in a wheelchair to SLMC Thursday afternoon.

The President had begun feeling ill late Wednesday after getting wet in the rain twice as she welcomed two batches of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) repatriated from war-torn Lebanon, Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye said.

Smiling and clad in a light blue suit, and surrounded only by her doctors and guards, the President walked out of the SLMC lobby and waved to well-wishers at 9:40 a.m. She looked refreshed, but was apparently still weakened by the flu as her feet wobbled for a moment before she got into the presidential limousine.

Her attending physician, Dr. Juliet Gopez-Cervantes, said she strictly advised Mrs. Arroyo to complete her rest over the next few days.

Presidential chief of staff Michael Defensor said the President apparently decided only yesterday morning to leave the hospital "so that she can stay comfortably in the Palace, as the doctor ordered that she fully rest."

He said the President called him up to remind him to limit her schedules so that she can immediately recover from her bout with the flu. Mrs. Arroyo said she was a "good patient" though members of the First Family and her Cabinet officials say otherwise.

Defensor, who was tasked to lighten Mrs. Arroyo’s schedules since her hospitalization for intestinal flu last month, admitted that he could only scratch his head while the President was barking her orders over the phone yesterday because she was the one who had been overloading herself with work.

"We are limiting her schedules within the Palace only," Defensor told reporters. "What we’re doing is to ensure a good spacing between appointments and not to allow her to have heavy evening engagements."

Mrs. Arroyo admitted to The STAR on Friday night that she had been staying up until after midnight working for several days in a row before coming down with intestinal flu last month and influenza on Thursday.

Yap said the President’s aides are arranging her schedules over the coming days "to ensure that she does not suddenly exert herself at work, risking a relapse of her flu."

There will be no public appointments today, the two Palace officials added.

At least three to four public engagements a day for the entire week were shifted to Vice President Noli De Castro, Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita and Defensor, who will stand in for the President.

However, Defensor said Mrs. Arroyo will still have some light public engagements tomorrow, where she will meet with some members of the diplomatic corps.

De Castro will represent her at the inauguration of the Makro depot in Mandaluyong City tomorrow and at the "mega regions" meeting.

Despite her lighter schedule, the President will have some private meetings with government officials, who want to raise "certain concerns," Yap said.

"The meetings will all be short," Defensor said. Yap said Cabinet officials are going to pick up the slack on the work for the "super-regions," a major concern for the President.

He said Mrs. Arroyo’s overall health remains good, adding that her scheduled executive check-up is "months away."

Cervantes said in an interview with De Castro during his weekly radio program "Para Sa Iyo… Bayan" that there was nothing alarming about Mrs. Arroyo’s confinements at SLMC.

She said the President was not spared by the influenza virus going around in what SLMC earlier said constituted the hospital’s highest incidence and admission levels for the flu.

"News circulated and questions were raised about why (the President’s) attending physician were gastroenterologists and liver specialists despite the news that said she had the flu," Cervantes said in a mix of Filipino and English. "The rumors hinted that, because the specialists caring for her specialize in the stomach and liver, we may be looking at something else, that’s why I’m her doctor."

"That is not the case. I started as an internist and it does not mean that if you are a doctor that you deal only with problems related to your specialty," she added. "Being an internist, we handle the case. Even if I was there, we asked the pulmonologist to help us because of the sub-specialty orientation of (SLMC)."

She also dispelled rumors that the President was hospitalized for a liver problem: "I want to clear up speculations that, just because I am (the President’s) main attendee, she has liver or colon problems. She has no such problems. None."

According to Cervantes, the President was discharged from the hospital after she was given her doctors’ go-signal that she could go home on the condition that she promised them that she would rest at Malacañang.

Doctors told Mrs. Arroyo that she could remain in the hospital this weekend if she was worried that she could not rest at the Palace because of her commitments.

"However, she promised that she would rest for the meantime so we let her go," she said.

Cervantes added that the President is still allowed by the doctors to do her usual office activities but was advised to be selective about attending meetings or nighttime occasions over the next week or two: "If possible, she should take time out for the coming one to two weeks."

"Anybody can have this (flu) infection and usually the most common is a viral infection, so we strongly advise individuals — not only the President — to be very careful with this kind of weather and to avoid too much stress," she added.

Mrs. Arroyo granted an exclusive interview with The STAR on Friday at the presidential suite of SLMC to make up for absence from the newspaper’s 20th anniversary celebration that night.

She said during the interview that it was simple classic flu and she asked the nation not to worry about her health. — With Pia Lee Brago