Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky broke weeks of silence about his health on Sunday, July 12, with a note to constituents posted by his office. He wrote that “last month, I took a fall which landed me in the hospital,” that he “was briefly unconscious and was taken to the hospital,” and that during his stay he also had “to deal with a mild case of pneumonia.”
McConnell wrote that doctors found no broken bones or concussion, no heart attack or stroke, and no tumors or hemorrhages, and that he had moved from hospital care to a rehabilitation center. He added that “on the advice of my doctors, I won’t be able to return to the Senate floor to vote quite yet.” A statement from the Office of the Attending Physician, released with his note, says he “has experienced several falls throughout the year that have been attributed to his post-polio condition,” that he entered the hospital four weeks earlier after falling at home with minor injuries, and that pneumonia early in his stay “responded rapidly to antibiotic treatment.”
The BBC notes that the statement, his first since his admission in mid-June, came with a photo of McConnell, 84, and his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, and that polio at age two left part of his left leg paralysed. NBC News reports that McConnell said he keeps in touch with Senate colleagues on the appropriations process and midterm politics. In the note, he links his plan to retire at the end of his term in January to the demands of Senate work. The statements name neither the hospital nor the rehabilitation center.