Let me paint you a picture.

There I was, lying in bed. My left hand partially amputated. My left wrist broken. My left arm covered in skin grafts all the way up to the biceps. My radial, median, and ulnar nerves shredded. My radial artery severed. My right thumb fused solid, held on by a pin after being reattached. My right arm swollen so bad from shrapnel and infection it is sliced open in two places and drains put in.

My right thigh, from knee to hip freshly grafted as well, the wound freely seeping blood. The graft donor site on my left thigh also seeping, and kept under a heat lamp to dry it out, so they can harvest more skin. My left inner thigh, from lnee to hip, sewn back together, with muscles and tendons and ligaments and arteries freshly reattached. My penis severed lengthwise and closed with staples and stitches. My scrotum closed and my left testicle removed. My face covered in shrapnel scars, lips sewn from being torn. My eardrums torn open, and my eyes umable to focus because if bruising of the retina and cornea. My brain damaged from the blast. My chest with a nice tube in the side to keep my lung from re-collapsing. mature of the wedding

Every limb has multiple wound vacs to drain away pus into a two liter container that must be dumped every four hours because it's full. Wounds have to be cleaned one day and dead and rotted tissue scrubbed out the next, for weeks on end.

Pain so bad I burn through morphine like candy, and the dose of fentanyl so high they can't increase ir, for fear it will kill me, and I am STILL in pain. Doctors considering putting me in a coma, just to give me respite for a few days, but the brain injury worries them about my ability to ever wake back up.

It has, at this point, been like this for several weeks. I wake up screaming for a nurse for more pain meds every few hours. When I'm awake, I am in absolute agony.

Into this comes Senator and Vietnam War Hero John McCain, a man who I greatly admired and respected. I'm doped up, but lucid, and eager to meet him. He comes is with Bob Schieffer from CBS, who is giving autographs in his new book.

John shakes my left stump (without asking) (my right hand is fully casted) sending me reeling in pain and calling for the nurse to push yet another bolus of dilaudid into my pic line.
After that, and a very uncomfortable silence, McCain delivers his "photo op" comment.

Yeah, that's right, he's there to do this for a photo op.

Visitors usually brought disposable cameras with them, and took pictures and left the cameras behind. Not John. He gad his own cameraman. He has no intention of taking a picture with me for ME, he simply wanted pictures of him visiting wounded troops for HIS use.

So let that tell you something.

And the person who wrote that blog post was my wife, who had been through absolute hell those last few weeks, from the dreaded phone call, to sending our two young children off to her sister, to travelling 1500 miles to DC to sit at my bedside and advocate for me and watch as I struggled to recover. To watch helplessly as I lay in unimaginable pain. To come running in at night, after the nurse called and told her to come say goodbye because I was going downhill very very fast and they didn't know why.
Dealing with all of that, and then he tries to use her husband for a photo op.
He is quite LITERALLY lucky she is a better person thsn I will ever be, because she just removed him from the room. Had the situation been reversed, I would have beaten him to death with my bare hands.

So let that tell you what you need to know about me and mine.

He endured years of torture. When it came time for him to provide solace, comfort, or just well wishes, he chose to blatantly use wounded troops for his own gain.

So no, I'm not sorry that I have no sympathy for him. I'm not glad he has cancer, it simply doesn't change my hatred for him one bit.