US Senator John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke while running for election in Pennsylvania last year, has been hospitalized in Washington after feeling lightheaded.
(Bloomberg) — US Senator John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke while running for election in Pennsylvania last year, has been hospitalized in Washington after feeling lightheaded.
On Thursday evening, his communications director, Joe Calvello, said in a statement that an “MRI along with the results of all of the other tests the doctors ran, rule out a new stroke.”
“He is being monitored with an EEG for signs of seizure — so far there are no signs of seizure, but he is still being monitored,” Calvello added.
Fetterman, 53, who attended President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address at the Capitol on Tuesday night, had gone to a Democratic Senate retreat on Wednesday.
Fetterman “left and called his staff, who picked him up and drove him to the George Washington University Hospital,” Calvello said in an earlier statement. “He is in good spirits and talking with his staff and family.”
In November, Fetterman, then Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, defeated his Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, a surgeon and television star, in a hotly contested race that was crucial to both parties’ aspirations of attaining a majority in the Senate.
The victory was a personal triumph as Fetterman was recovering from the stroke that he suffered last May. He succeeded Pat Toomey, a Republican who didn’t seek reelection.
He returned to the campaign trail in August after intensive speech therapy. He relied on closed captioning to conduct press interviews and in his sole debate against Oz, in which an uneven performance intensified questions about his health.
The significance of the race was underscored just before the election when Biden and former President Barack Obama campaigned for Fetterman, and former President Donald Trump held a rally for Oz.
(Updates with new information on his condition, starting in second paragraph.)
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