Arizona Republican Senator John McCain has learned he has a brain tumor, according to a statement released by his office on Wednesday.
The 80-year-old senator for Arizona underwent cranial surgery to remove a blood clot near his eye less than a week ago, and the tumor is related to that.
According to the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, where McCain had the surgery, “subsequent tissue pathology” performed after blood clot removal “revealed that a primary brain tumor known as a glioblastoma was associated with the blood clot. Scanning done since the procedure (a minimally invasive craniotomy with an eyebrow incision) shows that the tissue of concern was completely resected by imaging criteria.”
According to the release, McCain and his family are “reviewing further treatment options,” which could potentially include “a combination of chemotherapy and radiation.”
McCain’s doctor says that the former Republican presidential nominee is recovering “amazingly well” from surgery. Also, “his underlying health is excellent.”
His daughter, Meghan McCain, also shared an update on her father’s health via Twitter, saying: “The news of my father’s illness has affected every one of us in the McCain family,” she wrote. “It is an experience familiar to us, given my father’s previous battle with cancer — and it is familiar to the countless American families whose loved ones are also stricken with the tragedy of disease and the inevitability of age.
“It won’t surprise you to learn that in all this, the one of us who is most confident and calm is my father. He is the toughest person I know,” she continued. “The cruelest enemy could not break him. The aggressions of political life could not bend him, so he is meeting this challenge as he has every other. Cancer may afflict him in many ways, but it will not make him surrender. Nothing ever has.”
See her full tweet below.
Statement regarding my father @SenJohnMcCain: pic.twitter.com/SMte9Hkwkq
— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) July 20, 2017
Former president Barack Obama tweeted his sympathies to the Senator:
John McCain is an American hero & one of the bravest fighters I've ever known. Cancer doesn't know what it's up against. Give it hell, John.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 20, 2017