WASHINGTON _ Sen. Rand Paul has not had a good night's sleep since being attacked outside his Kentucky home in early September.
That's according to his wife, Kelley Paul, who published an opinion piece outlining the serious medical predicament facing her husband.
"As his wife, I have been distraught over seeing him suffer like this. There have been several nights where I had my hand on my phone ready to call 911 when his breathing became so labored it was terrifying," Paul wrote for CNN.com. "Despite this, he refused to give in to the pain and was determined to fly back to Washington last week to do his job."
"As we walked through the airport returning from D.C., he was shivering with a 102.5 fever, and the next morning his internist diagnosed pneumonia in his damaged lung," she wrote.
Paul was at the Capitol and voting, but kept his interactions with members of the media to a minimum.
She said the Paul family has had very little interaction with Rene Boucher, the retired anesthesiologist neighbor charged in connection with the attack on Paul that left the senator with six fractured ribs and related complications.
Paul was seen at the Capitol last week being unable to even shake hands with fellow Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
"The fact is, neither Rand nor I have spoken to the attacker in 10 years (since before his wife and children moved away) other than a casual wave from the car. Nobody in our family has, nor have we communicated with anyone in his family," Paul wrote. "With Rand's travel to D.C. in the last seven years, he has rarely seen this man at all."
A pretrial conference for Boucher's case is on the docket of the county court in Paul's hometown of Bowling Green next week, but law enforcement has said little thus far about increasing the severity of the charges against Boucher.
