And then sense prevailed. Egyptian officials agreed to issue Mr. Ghafouri a visa on arrival, and by Monday afternoon he was at Cairo’s Qasr el-Aini Hospital, where medics administered multiple vials of the lifesaving antivenin. By Thursday, he was on the mend.
“He’s doing very well,” Dr. Nabil Abdel Maksoud, a professor of clinical toxicology at Cairo University, said in an interview after he administered the final dose of antivenin. “He walks, he talks. I’m waiting for his enzymes and vitals to get back to normal, but he should be 100 percent fit in a couple of days.”
Normally, Mr. Ghafouri cheats death with greater apparent ease. Known for his extreme illusions, he was in 2011 awarded a Merlin, magic’s version of the Oscars, joining luminaires like David Copperfield and Britain’s Paul Daniels.
Three years ago he shared a photo on social media of the cobra that attacked him this week, with the caption: “I had never been this close to death”.
He was the first magician to be treated by Dr. Maksoud, whose regular patients include farmers and children bitten by snakes in Egypt’s vast Western Desert or its lush farmland along the Nile. When contacted by Turkish diplomats seeking urgent help last weekend, the case’s political dimensions never occurred to him.
“He’s a patient and we are doctors, and we have nothing do with politics,” he said. “We are all human beings, and we care for everyone regardless of nationality or religion.”
For analysts, the episode offered a potential model for Egypt and Turkey’s leaders to find some common ground.
“They could find a way to cooperate, at least on technical issues,” said Mustapha Kamel al-Sayyid, a political-science professor at Cairo University. “For example, European leaders take different positions on immigration yet they still meet. Ours could keep their political differences while cooperating in other areas, just like they did in this case.”
Source : Nytimes
