Mayor Thomas M. Menino said Wednesday that he was “a pretty sick guy” when he first checked into Brigham and Women’s Hospital Oct. 26 after an Italian vacation. But he declared that he is on the mend from a viral infection and a compression fracture in his back, even while offering no timetable for his discharge, let alone a return to City Hall.

“I felt lousy, really lousy,” Menino said in a telephone interview from his hospital room, his first public words since he was admitted 13 days before. “I talked to the doctors over there [in Italy]. I said, ‘I better get home.’ I got home on Thursday night. Friday I came to the hospital, and a whole team of folks came to work on me.