Sen. John Fetterman has said that the stroke that nearly derailed his successful Senate run last year “technically” killed him — but also left him without the fear of dying.

“I didn’t have a near-death experience, because technically I had died,” Fetterman, now 54, told Men’s Health about the medical episode two days before his Democratic primary victory that left him hospitalized.

“It wasn’t like seeing lights or whatever, but it was feeling that everything was being bounded up in things, all coming up through, and I was going to go up to a window into the sky.”

The then-lieutenant governor of the Keystone State then recalled being woken up by a doctor brandishing an X-ray, who assured him: “We got this, you don’t have to worry about your stroke.”

“People in their middle age talk about their mortality. I’ve experienced my mortality, so I’m not afraid of it anymore,” said Fetterman (D-Pa.).

The father of three also recalled vivid details of the day he suffered the stroke.

“I was walking into my SUV after using the men’s room at a Sheetz, and my wife, Gisele, said, ‘My God, you’re having a stroke.’ And I was like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ This side of my face was drooping,” he explained.

“I was in the process of dying,” he went on. “If all this would have happened when I was asleep, I never would have woken up. Or if we were in a remote part of Pennsylvania, I wouldn’t have made it.”

After sitting out the campaign for nearly three months, Fetterman believed he had missed the chance to defeat the Republican nominee, celebrity heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz.

“I didn’t expect that I was going to win, to be honest, because we were getting—it was a blowtorch. ‘You’re a retard.’ ‘You’re a vegetable,’” Fetterman recalled.

“At that point, I all but stopped eating. I was dehydrated,” he continued. “You would think that, ‘Hey, you won,’ and it was good. But it wasn’t. It was confusing and hurtful to my children, because they thought, ‘You won. What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with us?’”

The stroke has left Fetterman affected by auditory processing challenges, forcing him to use closed-captioning monitors to follow along with what people are saying.

Fetterman checked himself into Walter Reed Army Medical Center back in February to receive treatment for depression before returning to the Senate in April. He told Men’s Health that he believes he suffered some sort of “melancholy” all the way back to his childhood.

“My origin story is more complicated, because I was an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy to two teenagers that were just casually dating,” he explained.

“I always felt a sense of responsibility or ashamed, because I was essentially a mistake. So I’ve never been able to have anything but a low opinion of myself.”

Fetterman credited his wife for being “incredibly supportive” and hailed President Biden as being “above and beyond kind, supportive, and decent.”

“We’ve become like a little suicide hotline. I get so many messages on Twitter,” his wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman said. “He’s Zoomed with folks. Complete strangers. It happens every week, either someone who decided to go get help or finally decided to go to therapy.”

In addition to expressing gratitude for his recovery, Fetterman was thankful that his father, who is 73 and endured a near-fatal heart days before the interview, is on the mend.

“I can’t imagine if my dad’s heart attack would have happened six months ago, what that would have done to me. So thankfully I’ve been able to be back to 100%,” he said. “When I go visiting him, it’s a religious experience. It really is.”