Pope John Paul shunned medical treatment-book

ROME, Mar 15 (Reuters) Pope John Paul II played down his ailments and was often reluctant to receive medical treatment, according to a book by some of his closest aides, including his personal physician.

The book, which hit the stands today, also shows the Vatican knew the late Pope had symptoms of Parkinson's disease from 1991, but kept quiet about it for five years.

The 118-page volume, whose title ''Let Me Go'' is drawn from the pontiff's last words on April 2 last year, includes a detailed account of the Pope's medical history by his longtime doctor, Renato Buzzonetti.

The Pope underwent surgery in 1992 to remove a large intestinal tumour that was starting to turn malignant, but he kept silent about his symptoms and pain for several months, Buzzonetti said, and then delayed submitting himself to the urgent tests recommended by his doctors.

He had already had a major abdominal operation in 1981 after an assassination attempt.

In 1994, when the Pope slipped in his bath at the Vatican and broke his right thigh bone, his aides had to convince him to cancel a trip to Sicily scheduled for the next day.

Two years later, the Pope's many engagements and his reluctance to undergo surgery again meant the removal of his inflamed appendix, which had caused him recurring fever and abdominal pain, had to be ''continuously postponed''.

In 1996, during a papal visit to Hungary in which John Paul appeared fatigued, a Vatican spokesman said for the first time the Pope was suffering from an ''extrapyramidal neurological disorder''.

The Vatican officially acknowledged it was Parkinson's disease only in 2003.

FINAL DAYS ''The Pope always had a serene and concrete dialogue with me,'' Buzzonetti writes in the book, whose authors also include John Paul's faithful secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz.

''When it became necessary, he was the first to lucidly grasp the most pressing needs and quickly make the right decision. If in some cases there were delays or omissions, it was a conscious choice,'' Buzzonetti wrote.

Buzzonetti, who was the Pope's doctor for nearly 27 years, also gives a graphically descriptive, behind-the scenes chronicle of his final days, hours and minutes. Most details had already been published by the Vatican, in an act of unusual transparency, last September.

The Pope was hospitalised for two periods in February and March of 2005. During his second stay, he underwent a tracheotomy and had a tube fitted in his throat to help him breathe but even then ''he asked, with moving ingenuousness, whether it would be possible to wait until the summer holidays''.

Buzzonetti recounts how on March 31, three days before his death, the ailing Pope was attending mass in his chapel when he felt a ''sudden chill and violent shaking''.

His temperature quickly rose to nearly 40 degrees Celsius He suffered septic shock caused by an infection of the urinary tract and cardio-circulatory collapse.

Still, he asked to remain in his Vatican residence, where a full-time team of doctors were attending him, rather than return to hospital.

The next morning, the Pope was ''conscious and serene'' at a 6 a.m. mass in his bedroom. He started slipping in and out of consciousness at about 7:30 a.m. of April 2, the day he died.

Later in the day he muttered his last comprehensible words in Polish (''Let me go to the house of the Father'') before entering a coma and dying at 9:37 p.m.

REUTERS SHR RN2259