Steve Scalise’s Illness – How the House Majority Leader Fought Blood Cancer and Walked Back Into Congress

Steve Scalise has now survived two events that would have killed most people: a gunshot wound severe enough to leave him in critical condition on an Alexandria, Virginia, baseball practice field, and a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a blood cancer with a grim prognosis even for early detection. The fact that the same person experienced both of these events within six years of one another is the kind of biographical detail that challenges credibility. And yet here he is, back at his Capitol Hill desk, voting, working, and serving as the House Majority Leader with the subdued resolve of someone who has frequently had to wonder if he would return at all.

August 2023 saw the announcement of the cancer diagnosis, which was made with the matter-of-fact brevity that characterizes communications from political offices attempting to manage a delicate narrative. Before the diagnosis, Scalise had not been feeling like himself for roughly a week. Despite being the second most common blood cancer in the US, multiple myeloma is a rare cancer of plasma cells, the kind of white blood cells that make antibodies. It doesn’t make a big announcement.

There isn’t a noticeable lump or abrupt collapse. It quietly builds up in the bone marrow, increasing protein levels, weakening bones, and impairing the body’s defense against infection. Scalise’s apparent management of what seemed to be a general illness before receiving a conclusive diagnosis is typical of how the illness manifests. He might have had early symptoms for a longer period of time than anyone realized.

Following the diagnosis, he underwent a course of induction chemotherapy, which was finished by late 2023. His office reported in January 2024 that he was now eligible for an autologous stem cell transplant because the treatment had produced a positive response. The fact that Scalise was eligible for this procedure, which rebuilds the bone marrow’s ability to produce healthy blood cells using stem cells taken from the patient’s own body, is regarded as a major turning point in the treatment of myeloma. Not all of them do. The cancer’s response to initial chemotherapy, general health, and several other factors that his medical team clearly evaluated favorably are all factors that determine eligibility.

He returned to Washington by February 2024. Not shuffling in hesitantly either, returning to meetings, voting, and the visible machinery of House leadership. Although anyone who has followed the disease knows that remission in this context is not always synonymous with a cure, his office confirmed complete remission, which is a real accomplishment for myeloma. There is a chance that multiple myeloma will recur. Over the past 20 years, there has been a significant improvement in the five-year survival rate, which is currently around 60% overall and significantly higher for patients who respond well to stem cell treatment. However, most doctors still view the disease as manageable rather than definitively curable. The team at Scalise is aware of this. He probably does as well.

It’s difficult to avoid setting this episode in the context of what transpired on that suburban Virginia baseball practice field on June 14, 2017. During the Congressional Baseball Game practice that morning, Scalise was one of four people shot by a gunman who had come specifically to harm Republican members of Congress. He spent months in the hospital after the bullet tore through his hip, breaking bones and harming internal organs. He almost passed away.

Colleagues from both parties gave him a standing ovation when he returned to the House chamber in September of that year, one of those infrequent instances in Washington where the chamber momentarily stops being a battlefield. Later on, he claimed that the experience had reinforced both his religious beliefs and, somewhat controversially, his opinions on gun rights. The latter was criticized. However, the former—the faith component—seems sincere and reappears in the way he has discussed his cancer recovery, expressing gratitude to God for his remission.

A certain type of resilience is tested in a different way by illness than by violence. Even though recovery takes months, a gunshot is abrupt, external, and over in an instant. Cancer is internal, slow, requiring sustained psychological endurance alongside physical treatment. The months between Scalise’s diagnosis and his return to Congress were spent largely away from public view — undergoing treatment, recovering, working remotely where he could. The absence of a high-profile political figure from Washington rarely goes unnoticed, and Scalise’s office managed the information flow carefully throughout, releasing informative updates without being speculative.

Watching this particular story settle into something like resolution — a man who survived a shooting and a blood cancer diagnosis returning to one of the most demanding jobs in American politics — there’s a sense that the biographical arc is almost implausibly dramatic. The question of what comes next, medically, is one that Scalise and his doctors are managing out of public sight, as they probably should be. What is visible is the return itself, the continuation, the insistence on being present. Whatever drives that — faith, stubbornness, political conviction, or simply the human desire to keep going — it seems to be holding.