ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, August 24, 1996 TAG: 9608260046
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CALCUTTA, INDIA
SOURCE: Associated Press
NOTE: Below
Mother Teresa, beloved for spending most of her 85 years ministering to the poorest of the poor, was struggling for life Friday after suffering heart failure earlier in the day.
``Her condition has deteriorated since Friday morning,'' said Dr. S.K. Sen, director of Woodlands Nursing Home. Doctors had hoped to remove her respirator the day after she had a heart attack, but decided against it.
Doctors were giving Mother Teresa an anti-coagulant to ease the flow of blood through her left ventricle, one of the four chambers of the heart, which failed Friday. Her temperature was still 100 degrees, and she was receiving anti-malaria drugs.
The tiny, frail Catholic nun was admitted to the hospital Tuesday with a malarial fever. Doctors put her on the respirator Thursday when her heart stopped beating for nearly a minute. She was revived with electric shocks. Doctors said complications from her malaria brought on the heart attack.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who turns 86 on Tuesday, has maintained a grueling pace at her missions and orphanages in India and abroad despite her failing health. She suffered a heart attack in 1983 during a meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome. In 1989, she suffered a second, stronger heart attack and received a pacemaker.
Teresa's name has become synonymous with charity. She created a global network of homes for poor people, from the hovels of Calcutta to the ghettos of New York and the slums of Albania, her ancestral land. She was one of the first to establish a home for AIDS victims.
For more than 45 years she has comforted destitute old people dying in the gutter, sheltered infants abandoned in trash heaps and soothed the putrid ulcers of lepers. and succored the insane.
She has also been a powerful voice for conservative dogma, defending her values of life and family and arguing passionately against abortion, contraception and divorce.
On Friday, she was alert enough to receive visitors, including the chief minister of the state of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, but could not talk with him because of respirator equipment on her face, doctors said.
At the Vatican, the pope issued a statement hoping for her recovery. ``His holiness wished Mother well and hoped for her speedy recovery,'' said Sister Priscilla Lewis of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity.
At one of Mother Teresa's convents in Calcutta, more than two dozen nuns clad in the familiar blue-trimmed white habit of her order knelt in rows to pray for their leader in a barren white hall.
In silent vigil, the nuns faced a large crucifix and a row of tiny flickering candles. Only strands of sunlight filtered into the room, darkened for the prayer ceremony.
On a large chalkboard outside the convent, the nuns had written, ``Please pray for our Mother.''
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity pray forby CNBMother Teresa on Friday at one of her convents in Calcutta. color.
2. File/1984. Mother Teresa, shown in this 1984 photo calming a
victim of the Bhopal, India, gas disaster, suffered heart failure
Friday.