Sen. John Fetterman to return to Senate Monday following health scare

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) was discharged from the hospital Friday and will return to work next week, NPR reported.

"John is looking forward to returning to the Senate on Monday," Joe Calvello, Fetterman's spokesperson, tweeted Friday.

"In addition to the CT, CTA, and MRI tests ruling out [another] stroke, [Sen. Fetterman's] EEG test results came back normal, with no evidence of seizures," Cavello added on the senator's release from George Washington University Hospital.

Fetterman attended President Biden's State of the Union address on Tuesday. The next day, staff took him to the hospital after he complained of feeling lightheaded earlier in the day, while at a retreat for Senate Democrats at the Library of Congress, The Hill reported.

Gisele Fetterman, Sen. Fetterman's wife, thanked the "amazing doctors and staff" at GWU and everyone who sent "good wishes" their way "during this hectic time."

After Fetterman's near-fatal stroke ahead of the primaries in May, some had speculated that Gisele was the Keystone State's "de facto candidate." Rolling Stone reporter Kara Vought was among them, Fox News reported in October. Vought has since deleted that tweet.

Fetterman's stroke left him with ongoing auditory processing issues. As a result, he experiences voices that at times resemble the muffled voice of the teacher character in the "Peanuts" cartoon, as The Blaze reported Friday.

Adam Jentleson, Sen. Fetterman's chief of staff, said the senator's auditory processing issues had been well known for months, and described the response to the New York Times piece detailing the aftermath of his condition as a "right-wing freakout."

"Conservatives (mostly dudes). . .can't process the fact that voters embraced a man who was vulnerable in public," Jentleson further opined.

The piece in the New York Times described multiple accommodations afforded the senator in the wake of lasting effects from the severe stroke that nearly took his life. Among them are numerous devices that provide closed captioning of congressional proceedings, live audio-to-text transcription, and a custom desk in the Senate chamber.

"But his adjustment to serving in the Senate has been made vastly more difficult by the strains of recovery, which left him with a physical impairment and serious mental health challenges that have rendered the transition extraordinarily challenging -- even with the accommodations that helped him adapt," according to Annie Karni's piece in the Times.

Jentleson described Karni's piece about his boss as "balanced."

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