Condition of Kerry’s Wife Is Said to Improve

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/us/politics/condition-of-kerrys-wife-is-said-to-improve.html

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WASHINGTON — Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of Secretary of State John Kerry, who was hospitalized over the weekend after apparently suffering a seizure, was upgraded to fair condition from critical on Monday, the State Department said.

“She is undergoing further evaluation and Secretary of State John Kerry, her son, and other family members remain with Mrs. Heinz Kerry at the hospital in Boston, as they have been since she became ill,” Glen Johnson, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry, said in a statement. “The family is touched by the outpouring of well wishes.”

Mrs. Heinz Kerry, 74, grew sick while staying at the family’s vacation home on Nantucket on Sunday. An ambulance was summoned to the house around 3:30 p.m. and left shortly afterward for Nantucket Cottage Hospital.

By Sunday evening, doctors had stabilized her, but her condition was judged too serious for the small facility on Nantucket. She was flown along with medical personnel on her own private plane to Boston and transported to Massachusetts General Hospital. Mr. Kerry, who had arrived on the island a few days earlier after a long overseas trip, accompanied her to Boston.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry, a philanthropist and heiress to the H. J. Heinz ketchup fortune, became well known to many Americans during her husband’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2004. She was previously married to Senator John Heinz, a Pennsylvania Republican who died in a helicopter crash in 1991, and married Mr. Kerry, then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, in 1995.

Born in Mozambique, educated in South Africa and Switzerland, and fluent in five languages, Mrs. Heinz Kerry has served for years as the board chairwoman of the Heinz Family Foundation and is a patron of environmental causes. Among other things, the foundation awards $250,000 grants each year to individuals who have made significant contributions in areas like arts, technology and public policy.

In September 2009, she was found to have breast cancer, and she later disclosed it publicly and urged women to have regular mammograms. After treatment, she was deemed cancer-free.