Mandela: I’m losing hope –Wife

Says Madiba has lost his sparkle
Graca Machel, wife of former South African President Nelson Mandela has said that she is losing hope as the icon battles lung infection. Speaking to a local television station, Machel said it was painful to see her husband “ageing”. “I mean, this spirit and this sparkle, you see that somehow it’s fading,” she told ENews Central Africa. “To see him ageing, it’s something also which pains you …
You understand and you know it has to happen.” Mandela’s grand-daughter Ndileka told the same TV network that he had come to accept his condition. “I think he takes it in his stride, he has come to accept that it’s part of growing old, and it’s part of humanity as such,” she said. “At some point you will depend on someone else, he has come to embrace it.”
Military doctors are treating Mandela for a recurring lung infection, an ailment the 94-year-old anti-apartheid leader remains susceptible to because of his age and his 27 years in prison. Government officials acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the illness forced soldiers to admit Mandela to a military hospital at the weekend, though they said the politician was responding to treatment. Mandela fought off a similar infection in 2011 and once contracted tuberculosis while imprisoned.
Medical experts said respiratory illnesses like pneumonia striking a man his age are a serious matter that require care and monitoring. “They call pneumonia ‘the old man’s friend’ because it is the thing that ultimately carries many people off,” said Dr. Peter Openshaw, the director of the Center for Respiratory Infection at Imperial College’s National Heart and Lung Institute in London. “What I guess they’ll be doing is trying to find out exactly which type of infection it is and then to give it the most appropriate treatment.