Roberts leaves hospital 1 day after suffering seizure

WASHINGTON -- Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. left the hospital yesterday, smiling and waving, to continue his summer vacation in Maine, but faces a decision on whether medication will be needed to control the kind of seizure he had Monday afternoon.

People who have had two seizures -- Roberts also had one in 1993 -- have a 70 percent chance of experiencing subsequent seizures, said Gregory Krauss, an associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

The fact that Roberts's two seizures occurred 14 years apart, however, suggests that the chief justice is likely to be at risk of only infrequent episodes, the neurologist said.

"If all his tests are normal and he has no progressive lesion, he probably will have infrequent seizures if he is not treated," Krauss said. "Very rare seizures do not handicap your life, except that they make it difficult to drive."

Yesterday morning, Roberts walked briskly from Penobscot Bay Medical Center in Rockport, where he had spent the night, and jumped into the back seat of a sport-utility vehicle for the 20-mile trip to the village of Port Clyde.

"I feel great, thank you," he responded to a shouted question from a reporter in Port Clyde before stepping onto a pontoon boat for the ride to his house on Hupper Island.

Roberts fell from a boat onto a dock on the island Monday afternoon after experiencing what the Supreme Court in a statement called a "benign idiopathic seizure," which means tests did not disclose a medical origin for the event, such as a tumor.

The statement said that Roberts, who at 52 is the youngest member of the court, had "fully recovered from the incident" and that he "underwent a thorough neurological evaluation, which revealed no cause for concern."

Spokeswoman Kathleen Landin Arberg said she did not expect to release further information about the chief justice's health, such as whether he is taking medication or whether further medical care is planned.

Supreme Court justices are among the most private of public officials, and medical information that presidents and members of Congress routinely release is closely held at the court.

Now that Roberts has had a second seizure, he and his doctors will have to decide whether he should take anticonvulsant medication for the rest of his life or should avoid situations -- such as driving or swimming alone -- in which he could be injured during a seizure.

While older medications had a higher risk of side effects such as sedation and slowed cognition, those risks have been reduced with newer drugs, said Krauss, who works at Johns Hopkins Epilepsy Center.