‘It’s great to be alive today’: Donald Norcross returns to Congress after near-death illness

When Rep. Donald Norcross (D-Camden) boarded a plane from Florida to Philadelphia on April 6, the 66-year-old congressman felt perfectly fine and was prepared for another week of work in Washington. Just a few hours later, he was in a hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, barely conscious and fighting for his life.

“I came to for a moment because someone was yelling at me, ‘Stick with us! Stick with us!’ And I’m looking at him thinking, ‘What do you mean, stick with you? What are you talking about?’” Norcross said in an interview. “I had no idea how serious of a condition I was in.”

Two-and-a-half months later, following two weeks in intensive care and an extensive physical rehabilitation process, Norcross is at last set to make his full return to Congress today. He says that his near-death experience, which was caused by a gallbladder infection that progressed to sepsis, has given him new perspective as Congress debates a Republican bill that would likely result in millions of people losing Medicaid coverage.

“I never once had to worry about making sure that I had access to what is arguably the best health care in the world,” Norcross said. “And at the same time, I’m watching on TV news reports about how we are about to rip health care away from 14 million Americans who, through no fault of their own, are not going to have the access that I did.”

Norcross, who has represented the Camden-based 1st congressional district since 2014, said that in the lead-up to his fateful plane ride, he had no idea that anything was the matter. But he had quietly developed a gallbladder infection known as cholangitis, one that was progressing to sepsis, the potentially fatal condition that occurs when one’s body attacks itself in the process of fighting off an infection.

On his April 6 flight, the infection struck in full force. Within 15 minutes of takeoff, Norcross said, he was “on the floor of the plane uncontrollably shaking”; the flight crew made the decision to divert the plane to North Carolina for an emergency landing, a decision that Norcross credits with saving his life.

Norcross spent the first day of his hospitalization in North Carolina before being transferred to Cooper University Hospital in Camden on April 7, where he remained in intensive care for two weeks. The congressman said he has little memory of that period, but things remained “touch and go” for a number of days; at one point, he required heart pumps to keep his heart going. (His office’s statements from that time conveyed a more hopeful tone about his status.)

Finally, on April 22, Norcross was transferred out of intensive care, and he was released from the hospital the following week to begin his rehabilitation process. In the two months since then, Norcross said he’s worked to build his strength back up, slowly re-emerging into the world for things like the New Jersey primary election and an AFL-CIO conference last week.

During Norcross’s absence, of course, Congress didn’t slow down its own pace of action. Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House makes every Democratic vote (or lack thereof) meaningful; when a key procedural step in the GOP’s health care and tax policy bill came up on April 10, shortly after Norcross was hospitalized, Republicans were able to push it through on a 216-215 vote, a vote that Norcross could have theoretically forced into a tie had he been there.

But when the bill itself came before the House in late May, Norcross decided that he simply couldn’t miss the vote, rehabilitation or not. So he got himself to Washington for the first time since his hospitalization – “they packed me up in the Tahoe and drove me down,” he said – and stayed through the night and into the early morning hours of May 22, when the vote finally occurred.

Despite Norcross being there, though, Democrats still fell short by one vote, and the bill passed 215-214. Part of the reason for Republicans’ success: the recent deaths of three other House Democrats (70-year-old Sylvester Turner of Texas, 77-year-old Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, and 75-year-old Gerry Connolly of Virginia), all of whom left behind safely Democratic seats that have not yet been filled in special elections.

The deaths of the three congressmen have become part of broader discussions about age and seniority in the Democratic Party, discussions that began during last year’s debate over whether Joe Biden should have remained the party’s nominee for president. Norcross’s own medical absence became a footnote in those conversations, though Norcross noted that his condition wasn’t related to age and could have in theory happened to anyone.

And when it comes to age in politics, Norcross said that voters should be more interested in experience and ability than anything else.

“There was a movie, Soylent Green, that came out years ago,” Norcross said, referencing the 1973 movie in which it’s revealed that a dystopian society is eating its own euthanized dead. “That immediately comes to mind. ‘Oh gee, you’ve hit that magic age, go to the processing plant.’ I think we’re well beyond that… You look at the individual. Are they doing the job? Are they relevant? Do they have the experience? Just like we do every two years.”

The deaths of the three congressmen, plus Norcross’s own medical emergency, also followed in the footsteps of two recent New Jersey tragedies. Reps. Donald Payne Jr. (D-Newark) and Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson), two lodestars of the state’s congressional delegation, were both struck last year by serious ailments somewhat suddenly, eventually dying after multi-week hospitalizations.

While he was lying in a hospital bed of his own, Norcross said that Payne and Pascrell weren’t far from his mind.

“It brought me back, thinking, ‘What were they going through?’” he said of his late colleagues. “I was going to try hard to make sure that I made it back – not only for my family, but to continue the fight in Washington. I never lost sight of that.”