Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a 73-year-old Republican who has been in office for three decades and is presently running for re-election, revealed in an interview this week with News Center Maine that she suffers from a nervous system disorder.
Collins — shown in two recent polls to be trailing radical Democrat candidate Graham Platner by at least 27 percentage points — indicated, however, that the disorder has not interfered with her job.
‘I have had it for the entire time that I have served.’
“What I have is an extremely common condition that is called a benign essential tremor,” Collins explained.
According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, an essential tremor is one of the most common movement disorders. It causes uncontrollable shaking or trembling in various parts of the body. While usually affecting the hands and arms, it can also affect a person’s head, voice, and legs.
Studies have reportedly shown the disorder to be accompanied by a mild degeneration of the cerebellum.
“It tends to slowly get worse over time,” Rees Cosgrove, chief of the division of functional neurosurgery at Mass General Brigham in Boston, told News Center Maine. “It’s not associated with other neurologic impairments. So it’s not associated with cognitive decline or memory decline. It’s not associated with Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not Parkinson’s disease.”
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Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Cosgrove emphasized that an essential tremor is not a mental condition.
“I have had it for the entire time that I have served in the United States Senate,” said Collins. “It has absolutely no impact on my ability to do my job or on how I feel each day.”
The Republican said that she has never missed a Senate floor vote and is confident in her ability to serve for another six years, adding, “If you talk to anybody in Washington, they will tell you that I am the hardest-working person that they have ever worked with.”
Platner, who was the likely Democrat candidate to face Collins in the Senate race even before Gov. Janet Mills (D) threw in the towel last month, apparently has health issues of his own.
Platner — who previously identified as a communist, branded rural white Americans as racists, suggested that service members worried about being raped should buy “Kevlar underwear,” smeared all police officers as “bastards,” mocked Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and adorned himself with an apparent “totenkopf” tattoo reminiscent of the skull image popularized by Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel elite guard — said in an interview last year that he has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and has “a couple herniated discs.”
The Democrat, a Marine who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, recently told News Center Maine that he receives nearly $5,000 a month from Veterans Affairs, having apparently been given a 100% disability rating. He has cashed those disability checks in recent years while working as an oyster farmer and the harbormaster for the town of Sullivan.
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