Anxiety over an Ailing President

As the patient was coming out of sedation Friday afternoon, he got an unpleasant surprise. What had started out as routine minor surgery had turned into a serious problem. One small polyp had been removed from his colon, but in the process doctors discovered another, larger one. They knew that such growths very often become malignant. He would have to undergo major surgery: a three-hour operation, involving a deep abdominal incision, to be performed under general anesthesia, never a happy prospect for a 74-year-old man. The doctors offered him a choice: wait two or three weeks, or go ahead as quickly as possible. Go ahead, said the President of the U.S.

Thus began a period of suspense and anxiety that gets no easier to endure no matter how many times the nation goes through it. Ronald Reagan, chief of state, head of Government and Commander in Chief of the armed forces of the world's ranking superpower, would be unconscious for more than three hours on Saturday and, in his own words, "incapable of discharging the constitutional powers and duties" of his office. At best, he would be confined to Bethesda Naval Hospital for a week to ten days of postoperative recuperation after that. Even after he returned to the White House, it might take as long as two months for him to regain his full strength, and there would be continuing concern about the health of the oldest man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

The Government, though, would go on functioning, and somewhat more smoothly than in similar past crises. As his last official act before being wheeled into the operating room, Reagan at 10:32 a.m. Saturday signed letters authorizing Vice President George Bush to "discharge powers and duties in my stead commencing with the administration of anesthesia," which began 1 hr. 16 min. later. Though Reagan injected some caveats about the application of the 25th Amendment, the message marked the first official transfer of power from a President to his Vice President in the nation's history. Even after he reassumed his official powers almost eight hours later, a system was being put into place by Chief of Staff Donald Regan to run the daily operations of Government and reduce demands on the President while he recuperates (see following story).

Fortunately, there proved to be no need for more sweeping measures. The operation, which took 2 hr. 53 min., went smoothly. A team of six doctors headed by Navy Captain Dale Oller, chief of general surgery at Bethesda, snipped out a 2-ft.-long portion of Reagan's colon, the section containing the 2-in.-long polyp, and sewed the intestine back together. "Our patient, our President is doing very, very, very well," Oller announced about an hour after the surgery was completed. "The operation went absolutely perfectly." There were no signs of the complications that sometimes develop during or shortly after major surgery, such as excessive bleeding or infection of the wound. More important, there was no sign of cancer outside the intestine. "We don't know whether there was cancer in the polyp," said Oller. A definitive answer would be disclosed by the full biopsy tests, which were to be completed on Monday. "But," said the surgeon, "there was no sign of cancer in the patient." In other words, whether any cancer is ultimately found in the excised polyp, no malignancy appears to have spread in the President's body (see box).