After suffering a stroke mid-campaign, Sen. John Fetterman believed he would not be able to defeat his Republican opponent, celebrity heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz, writes Ryan King for the New York Post.

The experience forced him to face his mortality, and in turn, stop being afraid of it.

“I didn’t have a near-death experience, because technically I had died,” said Fetterman. “It wasn’t like seeing lights or whatever, but it was feeling that everything was being bounded up in things, all coming up through, and I was going to go up to a window into the sky.”

The doctors managed to save his life, but he had to sit out nearly three months of the campaign.

“I didn’t expect that I was going to win, to be honest, because we were getting—it was a blowtorch,” said Fetterman. “‘You’re a retard.’ ‘You’re a vegetable.’”

Even after he won, Fetterman was not eating or drinking enough. In February, he checked himself into Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he received treatment for depression.

The treatment helped, and he was able to return to the Senate in April.

Read more about John Fetterman in the New York Post.

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