I’m a Pennsylvanian, so Sen. John Fetterman tends to come up in conversation. The question people keep coming back to is: What happened? More pointedly: How could a Pennsylvania senator complain about meeting with representatives of the beloved Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia?

On First Opinion this week, two neurologists tackle the Fetterman conundrum. Careful to say they are not diagnosing him, they examine how some of the public reporting about Fetterman could connect to post-stroke symptoms. “Fetterman’s conduct may be neither a personal failing nor a moral awakening, but a documented, and only partly modifiable consequence of surviving a stroke. A conviction with a neurological substrate is still that person’s conviction. A lapse with one is still a lapse,” they write.

Recommendation of the week: In The Cut, Hannah May asks: “What does it mean to be a good mother to my terminally ill child?” She writes movingly about raising a child with metachromatic leukodystrophy — a child who will not grow up. It’s hard to pick the most gut-wrenching part, but for me, it might be this: “I’ve also had to give up on the idea of being the ‘warrior mom,’ the mom who fights for a cure for her child’s rare disease. Thanks to decades of work put in by the MLD families who came before us, gene therapy exists, it’s approved by the FDA, and MLD was added to the national newborn-screening guidelines in December. Children’s lives will be saved. The miracle has happened, just not for us.”