As A Stroke Survivor, I Recognize Fetterman’s Symptoms. He’s Incapable Of Being A Senator

Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman is grossly unqualified to function in the U.S. Senate. Fetterman’s defenders and apologists persist in referring to his communication difficulty as an “auditory” problem, suggesting that he’s just hard of hearing.

Even his critics in general appear to have not zeroed in on what I firmly believe to be his central problem – that is, aphasia – mostly receptive aphasia with some expressive aphasia too. He’s most likely not “just hard of hearing” – if indeed he’s hard of hearing at all.

Fetterman’s campaign has refused to release the candidate’s medical records since suffering from a stroke five months ago, making it impossible to know his diagnosis for sure. But as a stroke victim myself, I’m thoroughly familiar with that combination of aphasic limitations. I continue to suffer from them somewhat after a devastating stroke in 1996 (and after a smaller stroke this year).   

Fortunately, I’ve almost fully recovered from my expressive aphasia, and I’ve become much better with my receptive aphasia. My recovery from my first stroke, long afterward, took place by divine intervention, I’m persuaded, after my physicians had said that I would not recover beyond a slight measure.

Even after 26 years, though, I still must rely on closed captions while watching anything on my TV set.

People with receptive aphasia, which produces symptoms like Fetterman’s, hear the sounds, but have much difficulty in decoding and understanding the words – especially while trying to understand fast speech or strong accents. The words just do not fall into place correctly in our brains. That diagnosis would explain why John has used a computer-based closed-caption device during at least one interview and during the debate in Harrisburg on Tuesday.

People with expressive aphasia often have trouble finding the right words and effectively putting them together to express their thoughts smoothly and correctly. Many times I may utter similar words but not-quite-right words.

That diagnosis would explain why during Tuesday’s debate, Fetterman said not “good evening” but rather “good night” in his opening greeting, and why some of his comments and responses sounded so illogical and repetitive.

Aphasia, simply described, is a language disorder caused by damage to one or more of the parts of the brain that control the comprehension of language or the production of speech, or both. Sometimes the damage has resulted from a traumatic injury to the brain; sometimes it has resulted from a shortage of oxygen in the blood flowing into the involved part or parts of the brain; sometimes it has resulted from some other cause, such as dementia or a tumor.

My first stroke, the large one, resulted from a shortage of blood and oxygen in the left side of my brain due to a previously unrecognized nearly complete blockage of my left carotid artery, the vessel which supplies blood to the left side of my brain. The next morning I got an endarterectomy. Of course, we do not know what caused the stroke in the case of Fetterman.

People who suffer from receptive