Scalise, House Republican leader, has multiple myeloma

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), House Majority Floor Leader, announced today his diagnosis with multiple myeloma, a type of leukemia.

Scalise battles malignancy

Scalise, 57, revealed his diagnosis at 10:51 a.m. EDT, according to The Daily Caller. He will begin a course of treatment over “several months,” and expressed high confidence that he will survive.

Reaction was overwhelmingly positive, consisting of get-well wishes and a testimony from a man who survived prostate cancer.

Multiple myeloma, or plasma cell myeloma, is a malignancy of a type of immune cell that makes antibodies. A patient might be asymptomatic, or he might complain of relatively nonspecific symptoms. That seems to have happened in the case of Rep. Scalise, who reported “not feeling myself.” It is primarily a disease of middle-aged or older men, but usually affects blacks more than men of other races. Left untreated, it can lead to frequent fractures, frequent infections, kidney compromise, and anemia. Most of these complications are due to the nature of the disease itself: malignant plasma cells crowding out other, healthy cells in the bone marrow, which is the source of all blood cells. (Source: The Mayo Clinic.)

The shooting incident

On June 14, 2017, Scalise took a bullet to the hip when, as alleged, one James T. Hodgkinson sprayed the annual Congressional Baseball Game with bullets. Five other people took bullets – a remarkably low casualty rate considering that Hodgkinson allegedly fired fifty to sixty rounds over a ten-minute span. Several questions about the shooting – like where Hodgkinson got his SKS 7.62-mm rifle – remain unanswered to this day. More troubling still, Rep. Scalise was actively investigating human trafficking.

Hodgkinson died in the incident, and the Capitol Police recovered a “kill list” from his body. But no one has yet determined the motive for the shooting. Nor has anyone figured out why, if Hodgkindson was acting alone, he wasted such a prodigious amount of ammunition.