At Roll Call, an Uneasy Silence

Sen. Tim Johnson's Illness Has Raised Personal and Political Concerns on the Hill

The desk of Sen. Tim Johnson in his Hart Building office remains untouched as a sign of respect while he recovers. (By Michael Williamson -- The Washington Post)

The desk is heavy and wooden, well-used, not ornate. Lying flat on the uncluttered glass top is a big calendar. Diagonal blue lines cross out the days as they pass. The felt-tip pen is here, ready to continue marking time's march. But the last day that has been dismissed with a blue slash is Tuesday, Dec. 12.

For Sen. Tim Johnson, the Democrat from South Dakota, time is in suspension now.

Everything in his Hart Building office is exactly how he left it last Dec. 13: The morning when words deserted him, and they rushed him, speechless, to the hospital.

By the calendar is the Dec. 13 edition of the Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper. Behind his chair on the thick blue carpet is his briefcase, a scuffed black leather satchel, worn gray in places.

Johnson remains in George Washington University Hospital, undergoing speech and physical therapy after surgery to repair a brain hemorrhage. The initial horror and cold calculations of those first days -- when it seemed possible he and the Democrats' one-vote majority in the Senate might not survive -- have subsided. Now the questions are about absence: How long will it last? What does it mean to the state, the nation, the institution, when one senator is missing?

Next to the computer is a pad of paper with the U.S. Senate letterhead. Johnson had scribbled some notes and figures on the pad, federal dollars he was trying to get for projects back home. He was discussing the items on this pad when the bleeding in his brain stopped him, midsentence.

His staff has left everything virtually untouched as a sign of respect, a sign of love, a sign of not knowing what else to do. It is an appeal to presence in the void of absence.

The news from the hospital has been good, so far.

"In talking to his physicians, we really feel optimistic and confident that he is going to make a full recovery," says Brendan Johnson, 31, one of the senator's three children and a lawyer in Sioux Falls, S.D. "It is something that takes time. Unfortunately we don't have any type of exact timetable. What we do know from the therapists and physicians working with him at GW is that he is making much faster progress than anyone anticipated."

Johnson speaks only a few words at a time. "He's not conversational, in terms of long conversation," Brendan Johnson says. "He's clearly registering when we discuss topics. I think he loves to hear about how his [three] grandkids are doing. I also keep him updated on what certain baseball teams are doing."

Johnson has three hours of therapy every day, working with parallel bars and practicing naming objects, according to statements by his doctors released by his office. An MRI showed that the speech center of his brain is undamaged. And an angiogram showed that the surgery successfully repaired the original problem, called an arteriovenous malformation.

An AVM is a tangle of arteries and veins usually present since birth. Most of the estimated 300,000 Americans who have it never know and live symptom-free. In Johnson's case, two weeks shy of his 60th birthday, bleeding caused by the AVM suddenly disrupted his ability to speak and made him weak on his right side.