Connecticut’s Democratic Senator Chris Murphy announced he will not be returning to the Senate next week, but will be spending several weeks recovering from a stroke at a rehabilitation center.
Murphy, 53, said that he had been discharged from the hospital and was “working towards a full recovery.”
While attending his son’s hockey game last Saturday, Murphy experienced numbness in his arm, called 911 and was taken to a nearby hospital, where doctors diagnosed a stroke. In his statement on Friday, he said he had been “diagnosed with a small bleed in the thalamus region of my brain.”
“The doctors are very encouraged by the progress I’ve made so far,” Mr. Murphy said. “In order to take my recovery seriously and get back to work on the quickest timeline possible, I will be spending several weeks at a rehabilitation center after being discharged from the hospital today.”
The week before the elections, Murphy traveled the country to help Democrats get elected, and was an outspoken critic of Trump.
At least three sitting senators have had strokes in the past several years. Senator Ben Ray Luján, Democrat of New Mexico, was gone from the Capitol for five weeks after a stroke at the beginning of 2022.
Months later, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, spent a week in the hospital after what he called a “minor stroke.”
Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, nearly died from a stroke just days before his primary in 2022 in what was one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.