Pat Dollard

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Politico, headlined “Migraines Took Serious Toll On Bachmann”:

On the campaign trail in South Carolina, Michele Bachmann should have been basking in the glow of new polls showing her surging among national Republican primary voters.

Instead, the day was overshadowed by her acknowledgment Tuesday that she suffers from chronic migraine attacks — an issue that threatened to spiral out of control as the media sought more details about a potentially debilitating condition.

While Bachmann sought to put the matter to rest with a prepared statement denying that migraines interfered with her ability to work or with her ability to serve as president, more evidence surfaced raising questions about her condition.

In confirming several migraine incidents first reported Tuesday by the Daily Caller, a conservative online publication, POLITICO found new details of their effect on Bachmann’s performance and their pervasive influence on her congressional office.

In March 2006, migraines Bachmann suffered in the aftermath of an appendectomy prolonged her recovery from surgery, causing her to suspend her campaign and miss a week of work in the Minnesota state Senate, where she served at the time.

A migraine attack in May 2010 forced Bachmann to retreat to her congressional office and lie down in the dark. She managed to attend early afternoon congressional votes before flying to California and attended two political events, but she was in pain much of the time and sought emergency treatment. When Congress reconvened the following Tuesday, Bachmann missed a day of votes.

In July 2010, Bachmann missed eight House votes while being treated and released for a migraine by a Washington hospital. Her staff at the time blamed an unspecified illness for the missed votes. The attack caused her to cancel a planned campaign trip and, according to her own account at the time, took her four days to recover from.

The Daily Caller also reported an October 2010 incident that forced Bachmann to lie down at the home of a Connecticut donor who was hosting a fundraiser, and then to seek urgent care treatment in New York. Sources with firsthand knowledge confirmed the report to POLITICO.

One former top Bachmann staffer, who denied being a source of the Daily Caller report, told POLITICO the congresswoman’s migraines were so prevalent that the entire office and campaign staff knew about the problem — even the interns.

“Within the Bachmann team, this was not a secret about her headaches and the problems and doors going closed. It could be anyone from an intern to a chief of staff that could be aware of this,” the staffer said.

This staffer said it was a common occurrence for the congressional office to literally go dark when Bachmann had a migraine.

The congresswoman would go into her personal office, turn out the lights, and close the door, sometimes for hours, waiting for the headache to pass, the staffer said.

“On multiple occasions, we had to basically turn out the lights in her office, shut the door, and put a virtual do-not-disturb sign on her office for hours on end so she could lie there and try to recuperate from the headaches,” according to the staffer.

Bachmann’s campaign declined to go into the specifics of these alleged incidents. Spokeswoman Alice Stewart, who joined the campaign a month ago, said she had not witnessed any debilitating episodes, noting that Bachmann pursues a “grueling” and “intense” campaign schedule and has yet to miss an event on the trail.

Bachmann’s statement Tuesday, read at a South Carolina event, acknowledged that she suffers from migraines and takes medication to treat them. But she denied that the condition — a neurological disorder characterized in part by its incompatibility with normal activity — interfered with her work.

“Let me be abundantly clear,” she stated: “my ability to function effectively has never been impeded by migraines and [they] will not affect my ability to serve as Commander in Chief.”

The Minnesota congresswoman said her accomplishments provide proof that her medical condition wouldn’t keep her from doing the job of president.

“I am a wife, a mother, a lawyer who worked her way through law school, a former state senator … and a congresswoman who has worked tirelessly fighting against the expansion of government and wasteful spending,” her statement said. “Since entering the campaign, I have maintained a full schedule between my duties as a congresswoman and as a presidential candidate traveling across the nation to meet with voters in the key, early primary and caucus states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.”

Migraines are a chronic condition neurologically distinct from regular headaches, characterized by pain so overpowering that sufferers frequently must retreat to a dark room. Attacks afflict women more than men.

“The real distinguishing characteristic of migraine is that it’s a disabling headache, not just a minor inconvenience,” said Dr. Dawn Marcus, a migraine specialist and author of “10 Simple Solutions to Migraine” and “The Woman’s Migraine Toolkit.” “It’s one of those headaches that can knock you out of what you had been doing and decrease your productivity.”

The good news, Marcus said, is that a variety of treatments are effective to reduce the severity of migraine attacks. Preventive therapies include beta-blockers, antidepressants and anti-seizure drugs. Relaxation techniques, stress management and keeping a regular schedule can be just as effective as medication, Marcus said.

“Most people should be able to get [migraines] under control and function at a very high level, even if they are very frequent and severe,” Marcus said. “Maybe there would be a day where you had to take a couple of hours off because you had a really killer attack.”

If it’s true that Bachmann’s headaches frequently laid her low, “I would assume that would be affecting her current job as well,” she said.

Not long after the July 2010 incident that forced her to miss votes and a campaign trip, Bachmann told Fox News she’d been struck by a migraine suddenly while working in the Capitol.

“I had a sudden illness that came on,” she said in unaired comments reported Tuesday on the network’s website. “And the attending physician in the Capitol said that I needed to just go in. I had a terrible migraine. So I went in, and they tried to deal with it. And it was probably another four days that it took me to kind of get over that. And now I’m fine.”

At the time, spokespeople for Bachmann’s office and campaign told the Minnesota media that an unspecified illness had caused her to miss votes — eight votes between 12:23 and 6:23 p.m., according to congressional records — and to fly home to Minnesota rather than traveling to St. Louis to campaign for Roy Blunt, who was running for a Senate seat.

In the case of the March 2006 incident, Bachmann’s campaign at the time issued a statement saying her campaign suspension was due to complications after her emergency appendectomy, “including nausea and intense migraines.”

The surgery occurred on a Monday. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported at the time that she wouldn’t be back to her legislative duties until the following week as “doctors advised her to rest through the weekend.”

The intense interest in Bachmann’s medical condition — her own statement Tuesday acknowledged “the many questions I have received on this subject — and the lingering questions posed by these details may force her surging campaign to address the issue more fully.

Already, the issue showed signs that it was overwhelming her campaign’s ability to respond effectively.

One reporter’s attempt to get to the bottom of the story resulted in another unwelcome headline for Bachmann Tuesday when her campaign seemed to manhandle ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross. As he pursued her to her car outside an Aiken, S.C., event, Bachmann staffers grabbed and pushed him forcefully, according to another reporter’s account of the incident.

The question of just how much medical information is enough to satisfy voters has bedeviled prior candidates, and they have chosen to meet medical questions with varying levels of disclosure.

Dick Cheney released only a pair of letters from his heart doctors attesting to his fitness to serve as vice president – but then refused to answer any further questions on the topic. Bill Clinton never released his full medical records either.

Sen. John McCain, on the other hand, released troves of his medical records to the media twice — once in 1999, when he released 1,500 pages of medical and psychiatric records, and again in 2008. In 1999, the issue centered on the potential mental and physical toll of McCain’s five years as a prisoner of war, while in 2008 he sought to answer questions about his history of skin cancer and his advanced age of 71.

The issue may be complicated for Bachmann by the fact that the condition in question affects her brain and requires her to take psychoactive drugs.

Bachmann’s campaign denied her brother Paul Amble, a psychiatrist in Connecticut, permission to speak to POLITICO about her condition. But the congresswoman’s son Dr. Lucas Bachmann, a medical resident at the University of Connecticut who has knowledge of her treatment, told the New York Times on Tuesday that her prescribed medications include two to treat the symptoms of cranial pressure and vomiting, and preventive drugs he described as “standard migraine treatment medications.”

Because of these factors, “A two-paragraph statement where she says she’s OK is not going to fly. It’s not enough,” said GOP consultant Ron Bonjean. “This is an issue that is neurological in nature, that affects consciousness and the ability to think clearly.”

While the serious medical afflictions of presidents such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were largely unknown to the public during their terms, the world has changed, said Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota who has closely followed Bachmann’s career. Especially since the 1972 campaign, when Sen. Thomas Eagleton was dropped as the Democratic vice presidential nominee after revelations of his history of psychiatric illness, such disclosures are now expected, he said.

“We’re long past the point where the health of presidents and top-rung candidates is in the cone of privacy,” Jacobs said. “Presidential health is a matter of vital public interest, and now that Michele Bachmann’s moved into the top tier of Republican presidential candidates, the public needs to know if she is up to the job.”