Story highlights Kelley Paul, the senator's wife, says this was not a "scuffle," a "fight" or an "altercation"

It was a deliberate, blindside attack, she writes

Kelley Paul is the wife of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.

(CNN) The average person takes 20,000 breaths a day. Since November 3, my husband, Rand Paul, has not taken a single one without pain. He has not had a single night's sleep uninterrupted by long periods of difficult breathing or excruciating coughing.

As his wife, I have been distraught over seeing him suffer like this. There have been several nights where I had my hand on my phone ready to call 911 when his breathing became so labored it was terrifying.

Despite this, he refused to give in to the pain and was determined to fly back to Washington last week to do his job. As we walked through the airport returning from D.C., he was shivering with a 102.5 fever, and the next morning his internist diagnosed pneumonia in his damaged lung.

It is incredibly hurtful that some news outlets have victimized Rand a second time as he struggles to recover, delighting in hateful headlines like "Not A Perfect Neighbor," and concocting theories about an "ongoing dispute," based on nothing more than speculation from an attention-seeking person with no knowledge of anything to do with us.

The fact is, neither Rand nor I have spoken to the attacker in 10 years (since before his wife and children moved away) other than a casual wave from the car. Nobody in our family has, nor have we communicated with anyone in his family. With Rand's travel to D.C. in the last seven years, he has rarely seen this man at all.

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