Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) thought he was going to lose his Senate race in 2022 against Republican candidate Mehmet Oz, stating that the criticism he received following his stroke was a "blowtorch."
"I didn’t expect that I was going to win, to be honest, because we were getting — it was a blowtorch. 'You’re a ‘retard.’ 'You’re a vegetable.' Could you imagine if on the other end I was making fun of someone who had a stroke? What the f*** is — what the f*** is wrong with you? You know?" Fetterman said in an interview with Men's Health.
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Fetterman, who won the Senate seat by 5 points and flipped the seat blue for the first time since the 1960s, said the victory "didn't matter to me" because he fell into depression, brought on by a stroke in mid-May and an onslaught of criticism and attacks from Oz's campaign and other members of the Republican conference.
"I didn’t have any interest to be a senator after that. It was rough," Fetterman said. "You would think that, Hey, you won, and it was good. But it wasn’t. It was confusing and hurtful to my children, because they thought, You won. What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with us?"
"That’s what’s so f*****-up about depression. Even if you won, it convinces you that you’ve lost. I was on borrowed time from after the debate and the Election Day. Put together Scotch tape just to hold me together between the last couple of weeks," the senator added.
Fetterman and Oz held a debate on Oct. 25, 2022, during a time when there were several calls for Fetterman to release his medical records. At the time, he would not commit to releasing them but said he was fit for a full term in the Senate. Now, he said he didn't need to show the records to prove his ability to serve.
"There was a lot of 'Show us your medical records. Show your medical records.' I said, 'You want to see my medical records? Okay. We’re going to do a debate. You’re going to see our ‘medical records’ right up there in front of you — in front of everybody.' You can’t show people much more about where you’re at than you can by just getting out there," Fetterman said.
He said he knew the debate would be "rough" given Oz's background in television, "but I believed that people deserved to know where I'm at."
"This is what’s been done to me. So I did it, and I knew it was rough. And then I knew that’s when something broke, where I knew that the depression was a filled [free] fall. After that moment, that was all the tinder that was accumulating, accumulating, accumulating," he said.
Fetterman checked into Walter Reed Hospital in February and received six weeks of treatment for clinical depression. He said that, if not for that intervention, "I don't know where I would be at."
"So thankfully I’ve been able to be back to 100%, at least in terms of feeling good about everything," he said. "I’m able to pay it forward and to visit with my father all the time and be there and be there for the family of that."
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He said that right now, he is looking at being the "kind of senator that Pennsylvania deserves."
"I’m grateful for the choice that they made to give me the ability to serve, and I think the depression has made me a much more effective and empathetic senator," he added.