Senator John Fetterman was released from a Pittsburgh hospital he said in a social media post on Saturday, two days after he fell during a morning walk near his home in Braddock, Pa.
Mr. Fetterman, who survived a stroke that nearly ended his 2022 Senate campaign, was taken to a hospital after he became lightheaded and fell on Thursday morning, leaving his face bruised and scratched, his office said in a statement. After he was hospitalized, Mr. Fetterman was found to have “a ventricular fibrillation flare-up,” the statement said.
Mr. Fetterman, a Democrat who previously served as Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor and the mayor of Braddock, a borough just south of Pittsburgh, has been a polarizing figure in the Senate. A towering, tattooed, hoodie-wearing iconoclast, he has recently angered left-leaning Democrats with his pro-Israel stance, his interest in working with Republicans and his vote (along with six other Democratic senators and one independent) to end the government shutdown. Mr. Fetterman’s latest health emergency came on the same week that he released an autobiography in which he wrote about his battles with depression.
Mr. Fetterman, 56, was stricken on a morning walk from his home across the street from the Edgar Thomson Steel Works along the Monongahela River, a routine that he began to keep his weight in check.
He has been troubled by health issues since at least 2017, when as mayor of Braddock he was diagnosed with a decreased heart pump and atrial fibrillation, a condition in which the upper chambers of the heart beat out of sync with the lower chambers. Five years later, when he was lieutenant governor and running for a U.S. Senate seat, Mr. Fetterman suffered a stroke because of a blood clot related to his condition. The day of the Democratic primary, he was in the hospital having a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted in his heart.
The stroke’s impact became clear in the fall of 2022, when Mr. Fetterman, who had been absent from the campaign trail for long stretches, struggled to communicate in a televised debate with the Republican nominee, Mehmet Oz.
After Mr. Fetterman prevailed in the general election, the Senate made extensive accommodations for him when he arrived on Capitol Hill. He was also briefly hospitalized for “lightheadedness” within weeks of his swearing in. Shortly after that, he was hospitalized for depression, and he later credited doctors for saving his life by telling him his three children needed their father.
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