The English patients: operations on Princess Kate and King Charles Will the SBB pull the plug on Eurocity in Munich?

Britain is concerned about two English patients. ‘Royal surgical shock’, headlined the British tabloid ‘The Sun’: both King Charles III. and his daughter-in-law Princess Kate must undergo surgery, the royal family announced on Wednesday. In both cases, the palace tried to play down the excitement. The 75-year-old head of state will undergo “corrective surgery” next week due to a benign enlargement of the prostate.

After the procedure, Charles will not make any more public appearances for a “short recovery period.” The message: pure routine. The king, who has been in office for about 16 months, is “just like thousands of other men every year.”

The palace also rushed to address any concerns for Kate. The 42-year-old came to the clinic on Tuesday for a planned operation on her abdomen. But the royal family did not make public what kind of illness the wife of heir to the throne Prince William (41) had. It was not cancer, the palace announced – after publication of the first communiqué.

The intervention seems to be more important. The future queen will stay in the private clinic in London for a maximum of two weeks and will be absent for months. Police officers stood guard in front of the hospital where Charles’ father Prince Philip and his aunt Princess Margaret had been treated in the past. It was said that Kate wouldn’t be able to go to appointments again until after Easter at the earliest. British media were quick to point out that the princess had last appeared in public at Christmas. At the time, she attended a church service at the royal estate of Sandringham in eastern England with other members of the royal family.

The messages also shed light on how the royal health is being handled. Pure privacy, it is often said. Also in the case of Kate, the palace emphasizes that it only shares news if serious changes take place. This is also done in the interests of Kate’s children, so that Prince George (10), Princess Charlotte (8) and Prince Louis (5) experience as much normality as possible.

But in general, the royal family is now more open when it comes to health – there is an emphasis on some kind of educational mandate. It’s the same with Karel. The king was keen to share details of his diagnosis to encourage other men with symptoms to get tested, the British news agency PA quoted a source as saying.

His mother, Queen Elizabeth II, who died in September 2022, had already publicly announced that she had been vaccinated against the coronavirus. The reason given at the time was that the Queen wanted to put an end to speculation and misinformation. In a rare personal insight, the queen later reported on the consequences of her corona disease. “It makes you very tired and exhausted, doesn’t it?” the then 95-year-old said in a conversation in the spring of 2022.

(hah/sda/dpa)

(sda/dpa)