Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante says her body was sending her a message to slow down after she had a brief health scare last week.
“Last Tuesday, I just didn’t feel good,” Plante told reporters Wednesday. “I felt dizzy.”
The mayor marked her first public appearance since she fell to her knees during a news conference on Dec. 5. She was answering questions from journalists when the incident occurred.
Plante was giving a response when there was a sudden and long pause before she sunk down, saying she didn’t feel well. The event immediately ended but she was conscious when tended to by her staff.
In her first appearance since then, Plante explained that her vision became blurry. She realized if she lost consciousness and passed out, she might hurt herself.
“So my instinct just told me to get lower, get closer to the floor,” she said. “And after that the ambulance came over and everything was fine.”
The mayor spoke to her doctor and says “she needed rest. She chalked it up to an “intense” autumn, which included tabling the 2024 municipal budget and a controversy about past spending at the city’s public consultation office.
“I feel like often we tell other people ‘You need to think of yourself, you need to rest.’ Well, I guess my body did send me a message last week like ‘Okay, you got to take it slow.’”
Plante says she did rest and did simple things “just to calm things down,” like spending time at home with her husband and two sons.
Now, Plante says she is better form and with two more weeks before the holidays, there are a lot of things to be done.
“I’m up and running,” she laughed.
—with files from Global’s Annabelle Olivier and The Canadian Press
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