Clinton Expected To Fully Recover

The Blood Clot In Diplomat’s Head Is Being Treated With Thinners

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

— Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton developed a blood clot in her head but did not suffer a stroke or neurological damage, her doctors said Monday. They said they are confident that she will make a full recovery.

In a statement that revealed the location of the clot, Clinton’s doctors said it is in the vein in the space between the brain and the skull behind the right ear. She is being treated with blood thinners to help dissolve the clot, the doctors said, and she will be released once the medication dose has been established.

Clinton, 65, is making excellent progress and is in good spirits, Dr. Lisa Bardack of the Mt. Kisco Medical Group and Dr. Gigi El-Bayoumi of George Washington University said in a statement.

Clinton, who was spending a second day at a New York hospital, developed the clot after suffering a concussion earlier in December. She had fainted, fallen and struck her head at home while battling a stomach virus, her spokesman said. She has not been seen publicly since Dec. 7.

Phillipe Reines, her spokesman, said her doctors discovered the clot Sunday while performing a follow-up exam on the concussion. She was admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Clinton’s complication “certainly isn’t the most common thing to happen after a concussion” and is one of the few types of blood clots in the skull or head that are treated with blood thinners, said Dr. Larry Goldstein, a neurologist who is director of Duke University’s stroke center.

The area where Clinton’s clot developed is “a drainage channel, the equivalent of a big vein inside the skull - it’s how the blood gets back to the heart,” Goldstein said.

Blood thinners usually are enough to treat such a clot, and it should have no long-term consequences if her doctors are saying she has suffered no neurological damage from it, Goldstein said.

Clinton had already planned to step down as secretary ofstate at the beginning of President Barack Obama’s second term. Whether she will return to work before then remained uncertain.

After decades in politics, Clinton said, she plans to spend the next year resting. She has long insisted she had no intention of mounting a second campaign for the White House. But analysts say she would almost certainly emerge as the Democrat to beat if she decided to give in to calls by Democratic fans.

Her age - and thereby health - would likely be a factor under consideration, given that Clinton would be 69 when sworn in if she were elected in 2016. Some say that could become even more of an issue in the early jockeying for 2016 if what started as a bad stomach bug becomes a prolonged, public bout with more serious infirmity.

Publicly, Democrats reject the notion that a blood clot could hinder her political prospects.

“Some of those concerns could be borderline sexist,” said Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist who worked for Clinton when she was a senator. “Dick Cheney had significant heart problems when he was vice president, and people joked about it. He took the time he needed to get better, and it wasn’t a problem.”

It isn’t uncommon for presidential candidates’ health - and age - to be an issue. Bothin 2000 and 2008, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., had to rebut concerns he was too old to be commander in chief or that his skin cancer could resurface.

Two decades after Clinton became the first lady, signs of her popularity - and her political strength - are ubiquitous.

Obama had barely declared victory in November when Democrats started zealously plugging Clinton as their strongest White House contender in 2016, should she choose to take that leap.

“Wouldn’t that be exciting,” House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi declared in December. “I hope she goes - why wouldn’t she?”

Even Republicans concede that were she to run, Clinton would be a force to be reckoned with.

“Trying to win that will be truly the Super Bowl,” former house speaker and 2012 GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said in December. “The Republican Party today is incapable of competing at that level.”

Clinton returned to the U.S. from a trip to Europe, then fell ill with a stomach virus in early December that left her severely dehydrated and forced her to cancel a trip to North Africa and the Middle East. Until then, she had canceled only two scheduled overseas trips, one to Europe after breaking her elbow in June 2009 and one to Asia after the February2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Her condition worsened when she fainted, fell and suffered a concussion while at home alone as she recovered from the virus. It was announced Dec. 13.

This isn’t the first time Clinton has suffered a blood clot. In 1998, midway through her husband’s second term as president, Clinton was in New York fundraising for the midterm elections when a swollen right foot led her doctor to diagnose a clot in her knee requiring immediate treatment.

Medical experts said the seriousness of a blood-clot diagnosis varies widely based on where it is located.

Clots in the legs are a common risk after someone has been bedridden, as Clinton may have been for a time after her concussion in December. Those are “no big deal” and are treated with blood thinners, said Dr. Gholam Motamedi, a neurologist at Georgetown University Medical Center who is not involved in Clinton’s care.

But a clot in a lung or the brain is more serious. Lung clots, called pulmonary embolisms, can be deadly, and a clot in the brain can cause a stroke, Motamedi said.

Beyond talk of future politics, Clinton’s three-week absence from the State Department has raised eyebrows among some conservative commentators who questioned the seriousness of Clinton’s ailment after she canceled planned Dec. 20 testimony before Congress on the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomaticmission in Benghazi, Libya.

Clinton had been due to discuss with lawmakers a scathing report on the attack she had commissioned that found serious failures of leadership and management in two State Department bureaus were to blame for insufficient security at the facility.

Clinton took responsibility for the incident before the report was released, but she was not blamed. Four officials cited in the report have either resigned or been reassigned.

Information for this article was contributed by Ken Thomas and Marilynn Marchione of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 01/01/2013