Colleagues who have visited him "found him to be frail and frightened".
His health is believed to be frail, and his party, ZANU-PF, is deeply divided over who will succeed him.
He has been in virtual seclusion for the past two years and is said by close associates to be frail.
But he has skipped recent public appearances, including his 80th birthday celebration, and appeared to be frail and walking with difficulty in video images released in October.
That meaning that defines a person singly by one aspect, an aspect that is often said to be frail and tragic.
He told police that he had searched for but failed to find Mrs Threlkeld's neighbour Margaret Porter, 85, who his mother knew to be frail and unable to climb stairs.
The problem isn't that acknowledging women's frequent victimization saps their get-up-and-go and allows them to be frail flowers; it's that the discourse about sexuality says so little about female pleasure.
But older people who receive heart valves, veins or other soft tissue could be getting sick from implants, he said, with their doctors failing to make the connection because the patients tend to be frail and ill.
The two men now dominate political, economic, and security policy, especially since King Salman is widely reported to be frail from a previous stroke and to have mental-acuity issues.
It is the fourth time in less than a year that the former president has been hospitalised and the last pictures of him, released in April, showed him to be frail and unresponsive.
Patients had a mean total GFI score of 10.7 and were all considered to be frail.
