Just my speculation, but my guess is that it’s going to turn out someone mis-spoke, and that ventricular fibrillation is going to be corrected as being atrial fibrillation. V-fib isn’t something one has a “brief flare up” of, even if one is a US senator with access to the best healthcare in the world.
He probably just got a small piece of polish sausage lodged in the upper linin of his ‘eart.
Given that he was previously diagnosed with A-fib that certainly seems possible, in which case “ventricular fibrillation” was an atrocious error suggesting the need for new media reps.
NBC News prefaced the announcement with “This is usually fatal” which makes me wonder what REALLY happened.
Are his heart and stroke issues linked? For instance, does his heart condition create an environment where strokes are more likely?
Yes, they can be.
Atrial fibrillation does cause an increased risk of stroke. That’s why people with a-fib are usually treated with blood thinners like Eliquis or Xarelto, unless they have some kind of contraindication for being on a blood thinner. IIRC Fetterman’s previous stroke has been attributed to his having a-fib and not being on treatment at the time.
ETA. If I again recall correctly, the reason his a-fib was untreated at the time he had his stroke is due to his depression not being controlled, and his not wanting to take any medications due to that. At least I recall reading an article to that effect.
Here is an article from 3 years ago, where he just said he chose to not see a doctor and thought he could manage his health well enough with weight management and exercise, and regretted afterward not seeking medical treatment.
“The stroke I suffered on May 13 didn’t come out of nowhere. Like so many others, and so many men in particular, I avoided going to the doctor, even though I knew I didn’t feel well. As a result, I almost died,” he said. “I want to encourage others to not make the same mistake.”
Fetterman said he “didn’t follow up” because he thought “losing weight and exercising would be enough” to address his heart issues. He admits he was wrong, saying that the stroke he suffered was “completely preventable” and that his doctors have told him that if he had “continued taking the blood thinners, I never would have had a stroke.”
A year after that article, he did check into a hospital because of depression, but he had been neglecting his health as far back as 2017, when he was diagnosed with a-fib, and I don’t see anywhere he is directly blaming the depression as a reason for not seeking treatment.
Dr. Ramesh Chandra said he first saw Fetterman in 2017, when he reported having swollen feet. He said he diagnosed him with “atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, along with a decreased heart pump.” Although he advised him to follow up in the coming months, the doctor said Fetterman did not and “did not go to any doctor for 5 years and did not continue to take his medications.”
Rather, it seems like the depression came after all of his other health issues.
Fetterman, who had a stroke nearly a year ago, said his depression worsened after he was elected to the Senate in November.
“I stopped getting out of bed. And it wasn’t because I was just tired. It was just because I didn’t want to,” he said, adding that his children were confused about why he wasn’t happy after he won a grueling campaign.
I saw him speak at a rally before the election, and despite harboring some apprehension about his health issues, I liked the guy’s refreshing candor. Subsequent events have changed my mind. He’s a good man, I think, and well-intentioned, but we can’t keep going on with this drama for the next four years. In his memoir, he admits he should have dropped out of the race following his stroke but kept going out of pride. Step down Mr. Fetterman and allow Governor Shapiro to appoint a successor who can effectively work for Pennsylvania and build up enough cred to run again the next time around to keep that seat out of Republican hands.
There used to be what could be called “Pennsylvania Republicans.” John Heinz, Dick Thornburgh, Hugh Scott, Richard Schweiker, Bill Scranton (Sr. and Jr.), and Ray Shafer. Conservative but sensible. I even voted for some of them. Those people would be shunned in today’s Republican party. The downslide started with Rick Santorum, a man with an IQ well below triple digits, who still keeps getting trotted out by right-wing media to spout his ignorance.
It’s an absolute fucking disgrace, but we shouldn’t abolish it? Sure, that makes perfect sense.
I suppose you could say that reasonable people might disagree about whether the agency can be reformed, or whether the entire culture of ICE is so fundamentally rotten that we need to completely build a new immigration control agency from scratch. But then reasonable people don’t attack other members of their own party as “inappropriate and outrageous” for holding reasonable positions, so…
The way it’s operating right now is an absolute disgrace.
The idea that we should abolish our nation’s border enforcement mechanism is either impossible and unworkable, or if what they actually means is “abolish ICE and replace it with the same thing”, then it is equally performative and counterproductive as slogans like “repeal and replace Obamacare” or “defund the police”.
“Abolish ICE” is not a reasonable position. It either means “abolish border enforcement” which we can all agree is stupid, I hope; or it means “reform ICE”, in which case calling it ‘abolish’ is pointless, performative, counterproductive, and just bad communication in general.
Look, I supported the slogan “defund the police” because I had it explained to me that it didn’t actually mean defund the police, it meant decrease the responsibilities that police forces have to deal with and give those responsibilities to social workers and stuff. Great, that sounds like a good idea.
But since then, I’ve come to have two problems with that.
First, I saw that the slogan “defund the police” simply failed to communicate effectively. Most people who aren’t politically hyper aware had no idea about the more nuanced meaning to the phrase. They just heard “defund the police” and thought that it meant what it sounds like: defending the police. That made a lot of those people shut down to the actual message that I supported, of reducing the responsibilities handled by police so they can focus on apprehending violent criminals while people with better deescalation training and without guns can deal with other situations.
Second, I saw that in fact a small minority of people DID support “police abolition” rather than restructuring police forces. These people certainly weren’t Democratic officials, or even big supporters of the party, and they certainly didn’t drive the whole movement of support for police reform. But somehow, we all got saddled with a slogan that fits their toxic agenda much better than our own! Why should that be? I don’t want my support of police restructuring to lend any credence to their wonky policy, nor do I want the police reform ideas that I support to be conflated with that nonsense.
So for those two reasons, I’ve changed my mind on the phrase “defund the police”; I think it was a mistake for us to place our police reform eggs in that phrase’s basket. And I don’t want us to do the same thing with “Abolish ICE”.
I oppose the way ICE had been acting under Trump, and I don’t care whether we keep ICE as an agency but reform it or go back to the pre Homeland Security Act structure and have INS do it, or create a new agency; but the phrase “Abolish ICE” doesn’t communicate “I don’t like what Trump is doing and want him to stop”, it feeds right into the Republicans’ idiotic “Democrats want open borders” narrative. I don’t see why we should walk straight into that one.
Hopefully this new medical thing, whatever it is, will be an opportunity for Fetterman to resign his pro-fascism ass “gracefully” and we can get a Democrat willing to actually fight rising fascism.
Hubris seems to be his failing. He avoided doctors and stopped taking medicine, and was sure he could take care of himself despite being told he had a serious medical condition. It led to a stroke. After the stroke, he ran for office anyway, and while he won, the strain of everything led to a depression, and also bizarre behavior and political stances that seem the polar opposite of what he ran on.
Basically, he repeats the same pattern over and over again. He’s a superhero, he can do anything, he doesn’t need help or the advice of experts. And when reality strikes and he suffers for it (as do everyone else around him), he expresses regret, but then does it again.
I would not be surprised if he refuses to resign and keeps going until finally losing reelection, or being incapacitated or killed from his self-inflicted medical woes.
I can’t keep the phrase “big dumb lug” from rising to mind.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer (paywalled article):
His office has had plenty of time to clarify any error in announcing the diagnosis, but hasn’t.
Will we next be hearing about how “Sen. Fetterman had a touch of asystole today, but is fine and joking about it.”?
That reminded me of a post on another board (or maybe it was here; IDR) from someone who wondered how Sen. Fetterman would be portrayed on “Saturday Night Live.”
I thought of the episode where MC Hammer hosted shortly after Wilt Chamberlain published his autobiography, where he claimed to have had sex with 20,000 women. It was called “Remembrances of Love” and Hammer was on a bed with assorted lovelies, referred to as something like 17,386, 17,387, and 17,388 and he was wearing fake legs.
Mr. Fetterman also got a big gash on his forehead, and was given 20 stitches. Ouch.
“Senator Fetterman is being treated for mild to moderate brain death and expects to make a full recovery soon”.
How would you feel about someone saying that it would be wrong to abolish the Hamas organization, and that the only people proposing to do so are militant anarchists who want Gaza to have no government at all?
I suspect you’d argue that everyone who has chosen to join Hamas has, by definition, proven themselves unfit to exercise legal authority. In effect, therefore, you feel that the entire government of Gaza needs to be fired and replaced by people holding radically different views. I submit that at that point, the question of whether you have “abolished” the Hamas government or just “reformed” it is pure semantics.
I must have missed the incident where ICE broke into people’s houses, raped people in front of their family members before slitting their throat, and then brought the broken bodies of their victims through ICE HQ to parade them in front of cheering crowds in the back of a pickup truck. Can you remind me when that happened?
Or are ICE and Hamas not actually comparable at all?
The way that ICE treats foreign workers is fucking disgusting. Here’s how Hamas treats foreign workers:
One of them was decapitated by laughing Hamas members with a shovel. We know this because Hamas members thought this was such great fun that they filmed it. You ever see ICE do that? If so, I’ll agree, they need to be abolished entirely, not just reformed.