PM Gonsalves gets clean bill of health

Prime Minister, Dr Ralph Gonsalves has been given a clean bill of health by medical professionals in Venezuela, after having spent four days in a hospital in Caracas undergoing tests and having other treatments.

Gonsalves left St Vincent and the Grenadines on April 17, Easter Sunday after feeling a pain in his right side some days earlier, which led him to visiting local health facilities.

He returned home on Tuesday via Venezuelan airline, Conviasa, which made its inaugural commercial flight to the Argyle International Airport (AIA).

“I am in good health. The questions which my doctors in St Vincent posed, those questions were interrogated thoroughly in Venezuela and other queries about my health were interrogated, and I’m pleased to say they have all been answered favourably towards me. And those who anticipate that I’m about to kick the bucket, I’m around. Very much around. Thank you very much Almighty God,” the prime minister said while speaking at the welcome and air service signing ceremony at the AIA on Tuesday.

When Gonsalves returned this week, he was wearing a bandage on his left hand.

Giving a further update on his health on radio one day later, he explained that he often experienced stiffness in his left ring finger and had a procedure done on Monday, April 25 to have the issue rectified.

“There’s a simple procedure of sorting it out. So they did it for me. I couldn’t get the expert to do it while I was in the hospital. She was not then available but she was available on Monday. So I had it done on Monday and she had to bandage it because she said I have to keep on this bandage for at least three days…” he explained.

The prime minister reassured that it was not a major procedure and that the most important thing was to have his digit moving as it should.

Gonsalves thanked “the doctors and nurses and the government and people of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela for their kind assistance in helping me restore my health”.

He also thanked Vincentians and persons in the Diaspora for their expressions of solidarity, prayers and support during his time of “brief incapacitation”.
The prime minister also said he was “sorry to disappoint, or maybe I am pleased to disappoint those who don’t quite have my interest at heart, and who had me dead”.

“I’m sure that you noticed that the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” Gonsalves said.