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Meghan McCain on Tuesday told the audience of ABC’s “The View” that her ailing father, Sen. John McCain, is “doing good” as he continues physical therapy in Arizona.

The 81-year-old McCain, a six-term Republican, is battling an aggressive form of brain cancer called glioblastoma. He was hospitalized last month in Bethesda, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., for a viral infection and other side effects of his ongoing chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

He returned to Arizona before Christmas to receive physical therapy at Mayo Clinic.

“I just got off the phone with my father: ‘Do your physical therapy,'” Meghan McCain, a television commentator, said at the start of the first live broadcast since the holidays of the national show, “The View.” “We were on the phone. He’s with his physical therapist right now. They’re still in Sedona.”

She disclosed to her “View” co-hosts that she spent the “mellow” holidays with her family at the McCain cabin in Cornville, near Sedona. 

“We had a good time just cooking and hanging out,” she said.

Meghan McCain also talked up her father’s secret recipe for barbecue dry-ribs. “He did it like three different times, and I just kept asking for them, and I eat them for breakfast the next morning,” she said.

McCain’s office has not issued an official update on McCain’s health for more than two weeks. A Dec. 17 statement said McCain was looking forward to returning to the Senate in January, but it appears unlikely he will make it back to Capitol Hill before the Senate reconvenes Wednesday.

“Senator McCain is in rehab. He’s coming back in January, (and) we need his voice now more than ever,” his close friend Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Nowicki is The Republic’s national political reporter. Follow him on Twitter, @dannowicki.

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