Doctors Say Schuller Will Make Full but Slow Recovery : Prognosis: The evangelist’s condition remains stable after undergoing brain surgery in the Netherlands. He’ll be transferred to an Orange County hospital.
Doctors for the Rev. Robert H. Schuller were predicting a “full and complete recovery” for the popular television preacher who was released Tuesday from intensive care after emergency brain surgery in the Netherlands.
Michael Nason, a Schuller aide who discovered the pastor unconscious in his Amsterdam hotel room Monday, released a statement from Dutch doctors saying that Schuller’s condition remains stable.
“Dr. Schuller continues to make significant progress in his recovery,” Dr. J. Wolbers, senior neurosurgeon at the Free University Hospital, said in the statement. “His neurological signs are good. We do not anticipate any complications. And a full and complete recovery is expected.”
Surgeons removed a blood clot, which had formed in the left side of Schuller’s brain after he bumped his head accidentally while entering a car, Nason said. Schuller is 64.
While remaining optimistic, Nason said, “I don’t want to minimize the fact that Dr. Schuller has undergone major surgery and this was a major trauma for him.
“It will be a slow recovery.”
Doctors will decide within the next day or two when Schuller may be released, Nason said. After that, he will return to Orange County and be admitted to an as yet undetermined hospital for observation, Nason said.
Officially, Schuller is still scheduled to deliver the Sept. 15 sermon at his Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, said Beth Owen, church publicist.
Meanwhile, Schuller’s wife Arvella, and son, the Rev. Robert A. Schuller of San Juan Capistrano, arrived in Amsterdam where they received a sympathy message from President and Mrs. Bush, delivered by U.S. Embassy officials.
Church officials have been swamped with sympathy messages from around the world for the stricken minister.
“There seems to be a tremendous outpouring of goodwill,” Owen said, “everything from telegrams to cards and flowers from overseas.” Well-wishers were asked to send messages to the Garden Grove church because the Amsterdam hospital could not handle the deluge of telephone calls and faxes inquiring about Schuller’s condition.
Schuller had been en route to Moscow to reinstate his pioneering Christian broadcast, “Heart to Heart” over the state-owned broadcast network, Gostelradio. Nason said Schuller’s son Robert and son-in-law Paul David Dunn, producer of Christmas and Easter pageants at the church, will continue on to Moscow to deliver a videotape of Schuller’s prerecorded sermon. Soviet officials have promised to air the tape, Nason said.
Spiritual adviser to movie stars, athletes, world leaders and politicians, Schuller “belongs aside Billy Graham as one of the great evangelists of our time,” said John McKenna, assistant to the president at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.
Schuller, who started as a parking lot preacher affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, has developed “influence that transcends any particular denomination,” he said.
His “Hour of Power” television ministry now has a budget of $34 million a year supported by contributions from nearly 2 million viewers in the United States and an international audience in at least 31 countries. His Crystal Cathedral, a huge glass-and-steel structure built by architect Philip Johnson and equipped with a gigantic television screen, is one of the largest in the country.
Times staff writer Dan Weikel contributed to this report.
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