Wishing for a quick recovery for Sen. Kirk

What a difference a week can make.

Last Friday, U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., appearing hale and hearty, visited Bloomington to make a town hall appearance at State Farm Insurance Co.’s headquarters and to speak with the editorial board at The Pantagraph newspaper.

As of Thursday, however, the 52-year-old senator remained in serious but stable condition at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, the victim of a stroke that happened Saturday.

Doctors on Wednesday surgically removed two small pieces of Kirk’s brain to create more space to accommodate swelling. This came after surgeons on Sunday removed a portion of his skull to relieve pressure from swelling.

Make no mistake about it. Sen. Kirk has suffered a serious health crisis from which it could take a long time to recover to a new normal.

Doctors believe his mental faculties will be the same, but not so his physical abilities.

“The prospects for his full physical recovery, particularly on the left side of his body, are not great,” according to Dr. Richard Fessler, Kirk’s surgeon for both procedures.

The thing about Kirk is that he took care of himself. A Naval Reserve officer, he was active and physically fit – not the stereotypical candidate for a stroke.

But when he felt dizzy Saturday and realized something was wrong, he did the right thing. He checked himself into one hospital and was transferred to another, where doctors found he had a tear in the carotid artery on the right side of his neck. That was repaired, but with blood flow to Kirk’s brain having been disrupted, some brain cells died, causing abilities controlled by those areas of the brain to be hindered or lost.

The heartfelt outpouring of support and kind words for the senator has been impressive. A lot of people like and respect Kirk, Republicans and Democrats alike. His friend, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., kept an open seat – Kirk’s – next to him during the State of the Union address.

“I haven’t found anybody that’s going to replace Mark Kirk’s attitude, his true, gung-ho Americanism, wanting to continue to be the best country in the world, as we’ve been in the past, and willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen,” Manchin told the Chicago Tribune.