Rep. Wilson’s issues ‘resolved’ by pacemaker, lawmaker says

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who collapsed at an event in Washington last week, got a pacemaker and can return to his duties on Capitol Hill, he said Monday in a video message.

“With the pacemaker implant, issues have been now resolved for my public service,” Wilson said in a recorded video statement posted Monday to YouTube.

In the roughly one-minute video, Wilson said he was treated at the George Washington University Hospital. In a statement Friday posted to the website X, Wilson’s office said the 12-term, 77 year-old lawmaker “received a pacemaker and he is expected to be discharged from the hospital in a matter of days.”

A Wilson spokesperson reached by email on Monday did not respond to a query about when the 77 year-old, 12-term congressman was, or was to be, discharged from the hospital.

A pacemaker is an electronic device, placed inside a person during surgery, that helps compensate for an irregular heartbeat known as arrhythmia, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the National Institute of Health in the Department of Health and Human services. Recovery times vary depending, among other things, on the kind of pacemaker installed.

Wilson on Sept. 10 collapsed and suffered what his son, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson (R), described in a statement as “stroke-like symptoms.”

Wilson is running for reelection in South Carolina’s reliably Republican second district against David Robinson, a self-described entrepreneur and an Army veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, the 14-year war in Afghanistan that began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon near Washington.