While the political world responds to the shocking and sad news that John McCain has brain cancer, the senator’s daughter has captured the heart of the Internet with an emotional tribute to her dad.
On Wednesday night, five days after he underwent surgery to remove a blood clot from above his left eye, doctors confirmed that McCain has a glioblastoma.
This is an aggressive tumor that will likely require McCain to undergo radiation and chemotherapy treatments.
According to CNN, the average survival rate for someone with a malignant glioblastoma is around 14 months.
In response to the development, messages of love and support have flooded social media, as McCain is one of the best known and most respected politicians in the country.
“John McCain is an American hero & one of the bravest fighters I’ve ever known,” Tweeted McCain’s opponent in the 2008 Presidential race, Barack Obama.
The former Commander-in-Chief added:
“Cancer doesn’t know what it’s up against. Give it hell, John.”
Meghan McCain, meanwhile, posted a lengthy note on Twitter that attempted to capture all she was feeling about the situation.
“The news of my father’s illness has affected every one of us in the McCain family.
“My grandmother, mother, brothers, sister, and I have all endured the shock of the news, and now we live with the anxiety about what comes next,” she wrote.
Meghan’s siblings include: Douglas, 57, Andrew, 55, Sidney, 50, John Sidney, 31, James, 29, and Bridget, 25.
Continued the television host and personality:
“It is an experience familiar to us, given my father’s previous battle with cancer – and it is familiar to the countless American families whose loved ones are also stricken with the tragedy of disease and the inevitability of age.
If we could ask anything of anyone now, it would be the prayers of those of you who understand this all too well. We would be so grateful for them.”
Meghan was right by her father’s side when he underwent the aforementioned procedure at Phoenix’s Mayo Clint to remove a blood clot.
This surgery took place on July 14 and was not considered serious on its own.
But results from a biopsy shortly afterward revealed the cancer diagnosis.
“Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for all the thoughtful words and prayers for my father,” Meghan wrote as a caption to the following image on Monday.
“He’s doing very, very well with all of us in Arizona! I’m trying to convince him to watch The Crown with me…”
On Tuesday, meanwhile, Meghan has to clap back at Twitter trolls, even calling for the resignation of Nevada GOP committeewoman, Diana Orrock…who actually retweeted with “Amen” to a message wishing death to her father.
“You are a godless, horrible monster who should be nowhere near GOP politics – let alone society in general,” Meghan wrote of Orrock, who eventually apologized for being such an insensitive moron.
On Wednesday, though, Meghan wasn’t full of vitriol. Just love, affection and respect.
“It won’t surprise you to learn that in all this, the one of us who is most confident and calm is my father. He is the toughest person I know,” she wrote.
“The cruelest enemy could not break him. The aggressions of political life could not bend him. So he is meeting this challenge as he has every other.
“Cancer may afflict him in many ways: But it will not make him surrender. Nothing ever has.”
John McCain was shot down by the North Vietnamese in 1967 and was taken as a prisoner of war for over five years.
He has served in the senate since 1986.
“My love for my father is boundless, and like any daughter I cannot and do not wish to be in a world without him. I have faith that those days remain far away,” Meghan Tweeted last night.
“Yet even in this moment, my fears for him are overwhelmed by one thing above all: Gratitude for our years together, and the years still to come. He is a warrior at dusk, one of the greatest Americans of our age, and the worth heir to his father’s and grandfather’s name.
“But to me he is something more.”
She concluded as follows:
He is my strength, my example, my refuge, my confidante, my teacher, my rock, my hero — my dad.
Powerful stuff.
Please join us in wishing John McCain well.