McCain’s surgery recovery could take 2 weeks
The condition for which Sen. John McCain had surgery Friday might be more serious than initial descriptions have implied, and it might delay his return to Washington by at least a week or two, medical experts said Sunday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Saturday night that Senate votes on a bill to dismantle the Affordable Care Act will not begin until his fellow Republican returns. A statement released by McCain’s office on Saturday night had suggested that he would be recovering in Arizona, his home state, for just this week, but neurosurgeons interviewed said the typical recovery period could be longer.
The statement from McCain’s office said a 2-inch blood clot was removed from “above his left eye” during a “minimally invasive craniotomy with an eyebrow incision” at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix after a routine annual physical. The hospital said that the senator was recovering well at home.
A craniotomy is an opening of the skull, and an eyebrow incision would be used to reach a clot in or near the left frontal lobes of the brain, said neurosurgeons who were not involved in McCain’s care.
“Usually, a blood clot in this area would be a very concerning issue,” said Dr. Nrupen Baxi, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. “The recovery time from a craniotomy is usually a few weeks — at least a week or two.”
Many questions have been left unanswered, including whether the 80-year-old McCain had symptoms that prompted doctors to look for the clot. In June, his somewhat-confused Senatehearing questioning of James Comey, the former FBI director, led to concerns about his mental status.
“Usually, a blood clot like this is discovered when patients have symptoms, whether it’s a seizure or headaches or weakness or speech difficulties,” Baxi said.
President Donald Trump unleashed a new fusillade of tweets Sunday, defending his son Donald Trump Jr., slashing the news media and tarring his long-vanquished opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“Hillary Clinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News media?” he tweeted shortly before 7 a.m. Forty minutes later, he posted, “With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country.”
Meanwhile, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee called for more investigation into the digital activities of Trump’s campaign amid concerns about Russiandirected misinformation efforts to influence the election.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia said he wants to look into the activities of Cambridge Analytica, a data firm that advised Trump’s campaign, and into the campaign’s digital efforts during the election because of the way false election stories about Clinton were circulated and targeted online.
“The ability to manipulate these search engines and some of these socialmedia platforms is real; it’s out there,” Warner said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We need information from the companies, as well as we need to look into the activities of some of the Trump digital campaign activities.”
Separately, on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Warner said there was a series of “trolls” or paid individuals who worked for Russian services that tried to interfere in the election and disseminate fake news.
The comments came as FBI and congressional committees investigate Russian efforts to influence the election, and whether members of Trump’s campaign cooperated. Questions intensified after revelations last week that the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., met in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer who Trump Jr. believed had information damaging to
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Clinton. Also at the meeting was Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s personal attorneys, appeared on Sunday talk shows to say that the meeting didn’t violate the law and that the president wasn’t aware of the meeting and didn’t participate.
“I wonder why the Secret Service — if this was nefarious — why the Secret Service allowed these people in,” Sekulow said on ABC’s “This Week.” “The president had Secret Service protection at that point, and that raised a question with me.”
A poll published Sunday showed that Trump’s approval ratings have eroded further in recent weeks,
dropping to a level never before seen for a president during his first six months in office.
The Washington Post-ABC News poll said his overall approval rating was 36 percent, down from 42 percent in April. His disapproval rating rose to 58 percent, and 48 percent of those polled said they “disapprove strongly” of his performance, citing a loss of U.S. leadership abroad and the Republican health-care bill, which remains bottled up in the Senate.
The release of the poll brought another broadside from Trump. “The ABC/Washington Post Poll, even though almost 40% is not bad at this time, was just about the most inaccurate poll around election time!” he tweeted.