Politicising Hillary Clinton's Health

Here's a guest post from @CatherineBuca talking about Hillary Clinton's health. Like Cat, I'm no Clinton supporter, though she's definitely the lesser evil to the disaster Donald Trump would visit on America and the world. Here, Cat punctures the bullshit-filled balloons bobbing about Clinton's well-publicised funny turn and pneumonia diagnosis by pointing out its utter banality.

You'd think nobody had ever had their blood pressure drop and faint before. It happens to otherwise perfectly healthy people when certain stress factors are introduced, and certainly can happen to people who are already under the weather for one reason or another.

Let's take him indoors. Several years ago he pushed himself very hard to finish his masters dissertation. He finished it. He felt fine, if a bit tired. He came to pick me up from work (which is a story in itself), and as he was stood there as I was getting ready to leave he keeled over. No indication it was going to happen in the lead up to it other than he started to feel 'wrong' and then just went.

A few years later we've both got the flu, but we can't rest because my aunt's just died and I'm next of kin and we've got to sort everything out. We make it through the funeral, and we're on the train two days later to go and bury the ashes and we're sat there, doing nothing, as the train's going along, and over he goes again, in his seat. Exhaustion and dehydration from the flu and from not being able to rest. (The people telling me "he's probably had a stroke, love" didn't help. He hadn't.)

Cue a couple of weeks ago, he's in perfectly good health, but gets woke up in the dead of night by the cat scratching him. It's not too bad a scratch, a bit of blood but he's not scared of blood. I get him into the bathroom to clean it up, and he's fine at first, but then he can feel it coming on. He has to sit down. He goes wobbly. Eventually over he goes, toppling off the toilet seat and ending up curled in a ball out cold on the floor. He comes round, has a drink of orange juice, feels much better, goes to bed, is fine, is back to swimming and doing all the other things he does within a day. It was the shock of being woken up so suddenly that made his blood pressure drop.

When I was 18 I went out to a bar with my cousin. I started feeling quite hot, not quite right, and I wanted to leave (I'd not been drinking). My cousin was an arsehole and didn't want to leave. So we stayed. I was getting really warm, and felt worse and worse. Eventually, over I went. As soon as everyone got me up, over I went again. They got me outside, and then I was fine. It's never happened since.

Here then we have someone whose schedule must be hellish, who looks like she's probably suffering from a cold (now we know is pneumonia, apparently), but who hasn't let up on their schedule, who had to stand still for an hour or more which, as soldiers who pass out during passing out will tell you isn't the most fun thing, who it seems was dehydrated and overheated which was either brought on by the pneumonia or exacerbated by it, and so felt faint. It's not an unusual thing.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like Clinton and her politics. But if I'm going to critique her it's going to be on the things that matter and not based on some dodgy conspiraloon shit.