The stroke John Fetterman sustained in May “changes everything” about his life, the Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania’s US Senate seat who has had his health ridiculed by his Republican rival, Mehmet Oz, revealed.
He argued that his impairment was just transitory and that Dr. Oz would continue to be a fraud in January in a televised interview with NBC. He used a closed captioning equipment to read the questions that were asked of him.
His remarks are the most recent development in a contest that is becoming more competitive and may determine who controls the Senate.
The campaign has been characterized by animosity between Fetterman and his rival, a star television doctor whose career brought accusations of quack medicine for reportedly bogus diet pills and dubious Covid treatments. Earlier this month, Fetterman focused on claims that Oz had mistreated animals while working as a researcher at Columbia University.
In the NBC interview, Fetterman had trouble identifying certain words and having trouble pronouncing others. He acknowledged that the stroke had negatively impacted his ability to process sound and speak, which he purposefully emphasized after first trying to pronounce the term “empathetic” correctly and mispronouncing it as “emphetic.”
“That’s an example,” he said. “I always thought I was empathetic before the stroke. I now really understand much more the kind of challenges Americans have day in, day out.”
Fetterman responded, “It changes everything,” when interviewer Dasha Burns inquired about how the stroke affected his own day-to-day existence. Its entire environment has transformed.
“I sometimes will hear things in a way that’s not perfectly clear. So I use captioning so I’m able to see what you’re saying.
“And every now and then I’ll miss a word. Or sometimes I’ll maybe mush two words together. But as long as I have captioning, I’m able to understand exactly what’s being asked.”
