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Holding out hope (as sick as it sounds) for another Mitch zone-out in the next 10 days...c'mon Cocaine Mitch! You can do it!
Sure, why not? Though I'm assuming they're probably going to try and keep him out of the limelight as much as possible over the next little while.
if worse truly does come to worse, I’m sure his press/comms team will simply not allow any public appearances.
@dittopoop I would've said the same thing before it happened the second time
It's only happened twice. That's not a lot to draw strong conclusions from. OTOH, in the second video the response from his team looked well-prepared and not panicked. So presumably it's happened more than twice total.
So we're balancing frequency that it's happening against ability of him and his team to not have it happen on camera, and associated rates of change.
The ignorance prior is probably something like the time-invariant Laplace rule, which would give a probability of 1/2 that it happens again in the month following the second incident given two incidents a month apart (0.47 if I counted the exact days correctly).
@EvanDaniel We also know he suffered a serious fall in a Washington hotel that he was briefly hospitalized for with a concussion in March of this year. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/us/politics/mitch-mcconnell-hospitalized-washington.html
The speculation seems to be that this is some sort of absence seizure secondary to the earlier concussion he suffered.
If I follow the flowchart on my super basic introductory neurology PDF, that looks like non-motor and probably generalized, short duration (<5 min), and fits the Trauma criteria so not completely unprovoked.
So good news is a relatively lower risk for epilepsy.
The script I learned (no doubt an alarming simplification) is that this is typically seen in children and happens in clusters of short duration. Frequency varies a lot but these can happen upwards of a 100 times a day, but can be hard to notice since subjectively time just skips forward a bit, with complete loss of awareness.
For absence seizure first line seems to be ethosuximide. Blocks some calcium channels. Side effects drowsiness, lethargy, insomnia.
The numbers for the seizure-free rate of ethosuximide are 53 and 84% based on the two quick search results I found. "While ethosuximide is effective for absence seizures, it otherwise has a very narrow therapeutic profile"
Since the freezing happened more than once, the first-line medication has a narrow therapeutic window (so you can't just keep increasing the dose), and since absence seizures are a high-frequency low-duration phenomenon, if we assume all this irresponsible amateur speculation is even vaguely correct, I think he's likely to experience more episodes multiple times at all times of the day, and very possibly one of those times could be in public
