A day after speaking about his decades-long battle with MS for the very first time, CNN’s John King is opening up about his battle with the disease.
Speaking with John Berman on CNN’s New Day, King revealed that, for the most part, he hasn’t been able to feel his legs since the late 1990s. For years, though, the issue went undiagnosed. After the issues moved to his upper body during the 2008 Republican convention, that was when doctors finally were able to determine King had multiple sclerosis.
King, who is CNN’s chief national correspondent, says that he kept his struggles private out of fear, but now regrets having done so.
“And back in those days it was frightening,” King said. “It was very frightening. And I decided to keep it a secret, and then I kind of got caught in that. And very few people, a few people, dozen people know, my siblings, my family, those closest to me and my family have known about it. And more recently I told some people I work with. Mistake to keep it a secret because if I can do anything to help, I should have done that. I was scared early on.”
He added, “It sucks. Every day it is with me in some nagging way. Other days it is with me in more profound challenging ways. You fall down, you can’t pick things up. But
King is arguably best known as the operator of CNN’s Magic Wall — dutifully keeping track of the tallies nationwide on election night. Those evenings — a full week of them, in the case of the 2020 election — can be exceptionally taxing, the CNN correspondent says, because they require him to stand up for long periods of time on hard surfaces, which can exacerbate his symptoms.
“I was proud of myself,” King said — referencing how he felt after the election concluded in 2020. “I don’t like to talk about myself, I’m sorry. But at the end of that week, I was proud of myself because I knew how hard some of those days were. But it was important for me to do it.”
Watch above, via CNN.