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perhaps a little early, McConnell was talking just a few moments earlier and I suppose he still has to say "aye" once more tonight.

Grasping at straws

@zzlk Fair, honestly. The fat lady hasn't quite sung.

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!

@dieselbaby1337 Don’t get that man a glass of water. We need him as dehydrated as possible!

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.

@dieselbaby1337 This is why. He won't get another chance to be in public like this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/us/politics/mitch-mcconnell-freeze-kentucky.html

That's before this

just caught that

mitch live https://www.youtube.com/live/UagYHGDoFtY

LIVE: Mitch McConnell addresses Senate after health episode

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is expected to speak before the upper chamber after freezing a second time. #FoxNews Subscribe to Fox News! https://bit.ly/2vaBU...

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/05/politics/brian-monahan-mitch-mcconnell-update/index.html

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

@BTE Yup. We definitely have more information than the ignorance prior.

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