Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton's blood clot formed in her head,
her doctors said Monday, a potentially
serious condition from which they
nonetheless stressed they expect her to
fully recover.
Clinton, 65, was hospitalized Sunday at
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital for the
blood clot - in a vein between the brain
and the skull and behind her right ear -
and doctors said Monday that it did not
result in a stroke or neurological damage.
They said they were treating her with
blood thinners to try to dissolve the clot.
"She will be released once the medication
dose has been established," according to
the statement from Dr. Lisa Bardack and
Dr. Gigi El-Bayoumi. Clots such as the
one Clinton has can be serious, said
doctors not involved in her care. Dr.
David Langer, a brain surgeon and
anassociate professor at the North Shore-
Hofstra-Long Island Jewish School of
Medicine, said that if this type of clot was
untreated, it could cause blood to back
up, and could lead to a hemorrhage inside
the brain.
Clinton's doctors struck an upbeat tone in
their statement. "In all other aspects of
her recovery, the secretary is making
excellent progress, and we are confident
she will make a full recovery," the
statement said. "She is in good spirits,
engaging with her doctors, her family and
her staff."
The sudden turn in Clinton's condition
appeared to take members of her staff by
surprise. As recently as Sunday afternoon,
they thought she was on the mend and
ready to return to work this week.
"Yep, she's looking forward to getting
back to the office this week and resuming
her schedule (plan is Wednesday),"
Clinton's close aide, Philippe Reines,
replied to an email inquiry.
But by 7:30 p.m. Sunday, all that had
changed. Clinton, who had been home for
more than two weeks nursing injuries
suffered after she fainted and hit her
head, suffering a concussion, had been
admitted at NewYork-Presbyterian with
an ominous diagnosis: a blood clot
stemming from the concussion, Reines
said.
Instantly, the woman who, before even
announcing, has been widely viewed as a
front-runner for the Democratic
presidential nomination in 2016, someone
who has spent the past four years
keeping up a grueling schedule in which
she racked up miles as the most-traveled
secretary of state and visited 112
countries, was seeming
uncharacteristically fragile.
Instead of talking about who might be her
running mate, or how she had, even on
Monday, again been named the most
admired woman in the United States in a
Gallup poll, the chatter on the Potomac
shifted to talk about how, at the end of
the day, she is a 65-year-old woman
trying to recover after falling and hitting
her head.
This being Washington, there was plenty
of political finger-pointing. On Twitter,
those sympathetic to Clinton lashed out
at Republican critics who had accused her
of faking her illness. BuzzFeed helpfully
chronicled the top "eight people who
thought Hillary Clinton was faking her
concussion" because she didn't want to
testify before Congress on the attacks in
Benghazi, Libya, including The New York
Post, which called her concussion a "head
fake," and Fox News contributor Charles
Krauthammer, who called her illness
"acute Benghazi allergy."
David Rothkopf, a former acting
Commerce Department undersecretary in
the Bill Clinton administration, strongly
criticized the quick politicizing of Clinton's
health, both by allies and foes.
"It's a sign of the level of politicization,
that this woman could be lying in a
hospital bed dealing with a serious issue,
and the first reaction of all these people is
politics," Rothkopf said. "There's no
politics in a blood clot."
"The point is," he added, "people should
just stop and be human beings."
Clinton's friends say they have become
increasingly concerned about her since
she fell ill in mid-December from a
stomach virus that left her severely
dehydrated. She was vomiting constantly,
friends said, and fell forward, hitting her
head and blacking out. The result, one
friend said, was a contusion on her eye
and on her brain. She was forced to
cancel a trip to the Middle East and Africa
that had been planned for the next week.
On Dec. 13, doctors diagnosed her with a
concussion, and she was kept to limited
activity, according to a friend of Clinton's
who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because he didn't want to discuss her
illness publicly.
Reines said that on Sunday, during a
follow-up exam, doctors found a blood
clot and hospitalized her. "Her doctors
will continue to assess her condition,
including other issues associated with her
concussion," he said in a statement
Sunday night.
Dr.Geoff Manley, vice chairman of
Neurological Surgery the University of
California, San Francisco, said patients
with this condition generally need to be
treated in an intensive care unit, by
specialists with expertise in this kind of
clot. The treatment usually begins with
intravenous blood-thinning drugs, and
scans to monitor the clot. After a few
days, patients can usually be moved out
of intensive care to a regular hospital floor
and be gradually switched from
intravenous drugs to pills.Barring
complications, after a few more days they
can usually go home. But the clot may
take weeks or months to dissolve, and
treatment will continue for even longer
to prevent a recurrence.
This type of venous clot is more common
in women than in men, Langer said,
particularly with dehydration. But it is
impossible to say exactly what caused it
in Clinton's case - her head injury, the
illness, some other factor or a
combination. Given that she has had a
blood clot in the past - in her leg in 1998
- she may be prone to form clots, and
may need lifelong treatment to prevent
them, possibly with low doses of aspirin
or other blood-thinning drugs.
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