Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos was discharged Saturday from the Bogota hospital where he underwent prostate cancer surgery earlier this week.
“I’m going home, which could be the most agreeable feeling a person can have after such an experience,” Santos said outside Bogota’s Santa Fe Foundation hospital, where he underwent a surgical procedure to remove a malignant tumor.
“I’m completely cured,” said the president, who left the medical center unassisted, accompanied by his wife, Maria Clemencia Rodriguez de Santos, and the doctors in charge of his operation and subsequent recovery.
Santos was operated on Wednesday morning for a cancerous tumor of the prostate gland, an condition that he himself made known two days before in a speech to the country.
“Yesterday (Friday) it was reconfirmed that the cancer had not metastasized,” the president said, adding that the specialists handling the operation made 19 or 20 biopsies, none of which showed signs of cancer.
The president attributed the success of the operation that cured him to the tumor being detected “in time” in a diagnosis by his physician, the urologist and surgeon Felipe Gomez.
The diagnosis was checked by Santos with American specialists during the last week of September when he went to New York to take part in the U.N. General Assembly.
Those specialists confirmed the diagnosis and also agreed that he should be operated.
On Friday, in a fifth medical report, the Santa Fe Foundation hospital annouced that Santos would be discharged Saturday and that he would be disabled.
