Chris Murphy Hospitalized After a Stroke: The Connecticut Senator Is Awake, Alert and Expected to Make a Full Recovery, His Office Says
Murphy, 53, felt numbness in his arm at his son's hockey game Saturday, was found to have suffered a stroke, and is being monitored at Johns Hopkins — two days before a midterm election in which he has been one of his party's busiest surrogates, though he is not himself on the ballot.
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut was hospitalized after suffering a stroke on Saturday, his office said Sunday, in a statement reported by Politico and Reuters and read in full by this desk. Murphy, 53, began experiencing numbness in his arm while attending his son's hockey game on Saturday afternoon, his chief of staff Allison Herwitt said. He was taken to a local hospital, where doctors discovered he had suffered a stroke, and was then transferred to Johns Hopkins Hospital for further monitoring.
The office's account, as reported by USA TODAY, is reassuring in its specifics and limited in its scope: Murphy is responding well to treatment, he is awake and alert, and his doctors are encouraged by his progress. Herwitt said the office is optimistic he will make a full recovery. No type of stroke, no treatment detail and no discharge timeline has been released, and none is speculated here — the statement from his chief of staff is the whole of the official record so far.
Murphy is not on Tuesday's midterm ballot — he was elected to the House in 2006 and the Senate in 2012 and serves on the Appropriations Committee — but his absence lands in the closing 48 hours of a campaign in which he has been a national surrogate for Democratic candidates. For New Jersey voters the news is national, not local: no New Jersey race changes because of it. What changes is the Senate itself, briefly — a 53-year-old senator in a hospital bed in Baltimore, with his office saying the expectation is that he comes back.
