Brazil’s President Lula Is in ICU After Emergency Brain Surgery

Asia Pacific|Brazil’s Lula Undergoes Emergency Surgery for Bleeding in Skull

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil underwent emergency surgery to ease bleeding in his skull that doctors believe is connected to a fall he suffered at home in October, the hospital treating him said in a statement on Tuesday.

The surgery — to drain a hematoma, or pooling of blood — was “uneventful,” and Mr. Lula is recovering in the intensive care unit at a hospital in São Paulo, according to the statement from the hospital that was shared by the president’s social media accounts.

Mr. Lula, 79, went to Hospital Sírio-Libanês in Brasília on Monday night with a headache. Magnetic resonance imaging, or M.R.I., showed he was suffering from an intracranial hemorrhage. He was then transferred to Hospital Sírio-Libanês in São Paulo for surgery, the statement said.

The surgery came around two months after Mr. Lula fell in the bathroom at the presidential residence when moving off a stool he was sitting on to cut his nails, he has said in interviews since. He has said he received several stitches to close a wound on the back of his head from the Oct. 19 fall and had been undergoing periodic M.R.I. exams to check for signs of bleeding.

Doctors advised him to stop traveling by plane after the incident, so he canceled trips to Russia and Azerbaijan for conferences in October and November.

“I’m taking preventive medicine. The doctors told me that it’s going to take 20 to 30 days to know the effects of the fall,” he said in a television interview last month. “So I can only say that it was a very strong blow.”

A news release from his doctors in early November said that tests showed Mr. Lula’s condition was stable, so he could resume his usual activities, including air travel, local media reported at the time.