Sanders’ wife expects him to be ready for debate
Sen. Bernie Sanders, recovering in a Las Vegas hospital from a procedure to treat a clogged artery, should be able to return home by the end of this weekend and will participate in the next Democratic debate, his wife, Jane Sanders, said Thursday.
“Bernie is up and about,” Jane Sanders said in a statement Thursday. “We expect Bernie will be discharged and on a plane back to Burlington before the end of the weekend.”
Sanders’ campaign has declined to say whether he had suffered a heart attack, and his wife’s statement did not address that.
On Wednesday, Sanders’ campaign said he experienced “some chest discomfort” during an event Tuesday evening; a medical evaluation found blockage in one artery, and two stents were inserted. He has canceled a two- day college tour this week in California, and his aides have not said when he would return to the campaign trail.
Placing stents in arteries is a common procedure, and patients generally return home within a day or two. Jane Sanders did not specify whether Bernie Sanders, 78, would be discharged sooner than the weekend and would remain in Las Vegas before returning home.
Dr. Brahmajee Nallamothu, an interventional cardiologist at the University of Michigan, said it is hard to read too much into Sanders’ apparently prolonged hospital stay. If a blood vessel’s anatomy is complex, he said, cardiologists might keep a patient for an extra day. But a stay of several days, he said, “is not typical unless there is an additional issue.”
Nallamothu said he had watched a video of Sanders’ event at a Las Vegas restaurant Tuesday night when the senator, looking distressed, removed his jacket and asked for a chair so he could sit down.
The symptoms, Nallamothu said, suggest that Sanders might have had a small heart attack — defined as a blockage that results in some damage to the heart muscle — or almost had a small heart attack. But he does not seem to have had a major one.