Do Voters Care About John Fetterman’s Stroke?
Every second of every day, oxygen-rich blood is coursing through your brain. Your heart pumps it up through your chest and neck, along tinier and tinier arterial tubes, twisting and turning among the grooves and lobes of gray matter until it reaches the brain cells it’s meant to nourish. But this journey can be interrupted. An artery can get clogged—often by a free-floating, gelatinous clot—which halts the flow of blood. The clog will starve your brain’s cells of oxygen. Within moments, your brain’s tissue will start to die.
This is what happened to John Fetterman in May of this year, when he suffered an ischemic stroke—a type that affects in the United States annually. Five months later, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor says he still struggles to process the words that he hears, and sometimes he can’t quite express what he means. For a regular person, these effects would not be newsworthy. Fetterman, though, is a candidate for the U.S. Senate. This week, NBC News’s Dasha Burns that Fetterman seemed unable to participate in preinterview small talk conducted without closed captioning, but recent Fetterman pushed back, saying he’d done just fine when they spoke with
