When Sen. Chris Van Hollen felt a sharp pain in his neck, then felt light-headed, two minutes into a speech at the Rocky Gap Resort last month, he had to make a quick decision.
Should he tell his audience, which had gathered for the Western Maryland Democratic Summit, that he wasn’t feeling well, and sit down? Or should he ignore his symptoms and “muscle through”?
He decided to continue speaking, propping his arm on the lectern for balance. “It was a pretty good speech, after all,” he recalled with a chuckle.
To those in the crowd, he showed no visible signs of being in distress at the time.
Although he finished his remarks, his condition deteriorated, and that evening Van Hollen was rushed from his home in Kensington to George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. That’s where he received the “scary” diagnosis: The pain he was feeling was due to a neck vein that had burst — a “sub-arachnoid bleed.”
