Reuters again:
Castro surgery seems to have been botched: experts
Cuban leader Fidel Castro has long prided himself on Cuba's doctors and free public health care system, but that system seems to have let him down after he fell ill in July , U.S.-based doctors said on Tuesday.
Based on a report in Tuesday's edition of Spain's El Pais newspaper, the doctors -- who have no first-hand knowledge of Castro's condition -- said Castro had received questionable or even botched care at the hands of health experts on his communist-ruled island.
...
Gerson and Dr. Meyer Solny, a veteran gastrointestinal expert at New York Presbyterian Hospital and the Weill Cornell College of Medicine, said Castro's doctors erred by seeking to avoid a colostomy -- or opening in the abdomen to get rid of stool -- after an initial operation to remove part of his large intestine.
"They took a chance, which was probably not the best judgment under the circumstances," Gerson said.
"It sounds like they tried to spare him the colostomy, which would have been the safer and more conservative approach, and what they did was to try to establish continuity of the bowel by sewing the colon to the rectum, and for one reason or another it sounds like that didn't work. And now there are troubles," said Solny.
Gerson said the Cuban doctors appeared to have suffered one problem after another.
"What you're into is multiple operations with complications and infection in someone his age, you know, the wear and tear is going to start wearing him down, and he's going to get weaker," he said.
sounds like the old man is going through a lot of pain 