Chapter 10
“THE MOST OBEDIENT
WOMAN IN THE CHURCH”
Even though Mother Teresa kept up her busy schedule, it was clear by the
early 1990s that traveling from place to place, visiting many of the world’s
most troubled spots, could not last forever. Beginning in 1989, her health
began deteriorating. In September of that year, she suffered a near-fatal
heart attack and underwent major surgery. The heart trouble was not new;
she had first been diagnosed with it almost 15 years earlier. Still, she con-
tinued her frenetic pace.
After being fitted with a pacemaker in December 1989, Mother Teresa
traveled to establish new homes for the Missionaries of Charity. But in
1991, she was hospitalized again, this time at the Scripps Clinic and Re-
search Foundation in La Jolla, California, where she was treated for heart
disease and bacterial pneumonia. Later, she took ill while visiting in Ti-
juana, Mexico, and doctors were forced to perform surgery to open a blood
vessel.
Although increasingly frail, Mother Teresa did not slow down. Then,
in 1993, while in Rome, she fell and broke her ribs. That July, she was
hospitalized for two days in Bombay for exhaustion; not more than a
month later, she was back in the hospital in New Delhi, this time for a
malarial infection, which was further complicated by heart and lung
problems. She was transferred to the All India Institute of Medical Sci-
ences, where she recuperated in the intensive-care coronary unit. She
was home in Calcutta for less than a month, when she was treated by
doctors yet again, this time for a blocked heart vessel. Clearly, age and
the years of deprivation, travel, and work were taking their toll on
Mother Teresa’s health.