President Joe Biden is in the middle of his fourth presidential campaign, following previous campaigns in 1988, 2008, and 2020.
He’s seen his polls sag badly amid concerns about his age and mental acuity… and he dealt with similar issues in ’88.
While on the campaign trail, Biden was suffering headaches misdiagnosed as symptoms of a pinched nerve, according to his memoir. Shortly after suspending his campaign, he was rushed to the hospital for a burst brain aneurysm.
And his family just admitted that it was even worse than we thought.
One Biden insider resurrected this old story Tuesday by giving a juicy quote to the Washington Post.
Valerie Biden Owens, the president’s sister, recounted Jill Biden’s refusal to let a priest give her husband his Last Rites in the hospital.
“You’re not giving him the last rites,” Jill Biden told the priest, according to the remarks from the president’s sister. “He’s not going to die.”
Biden himself has written about the aneurysm in his memoir. He recalled the doctors finding two aneurysms: one still intact on the right side and one having already burst on the left side.
He opted for a risky surgery, and different insiders offer varying accounts of the survival rate. In her memoir, Jill Biden described “a fifty-fifty chance Joe wouldn’t survive surgery.”
President Biden has described the prognosis differently. “As I heard it, my chances of surviving the surgery were certainly better than fifty-fifty. But the chances of waking up with serious deficits to my mental faculties were more significant,” he wrote.
In September 2020, Biden added that he had “a relatively small chance of making it after it was all over.”
The surgeon said that he saw Biden’s second aneurysm rupture on the operating table. By that time, the surgeon was already inside Biden’s skull, and he could control the bleeding. The surgeon’s account was confirmed by Ted Kaufman, Biden’s chief of staff in the Senate.
Biden did not mention the second rupture in his memoir.
About 6.8 million Americans are living with aneurysms. Most patients with unburst aneurysms live a normal life.
On the other hand, about 30,000 Americans see their aneurysms burst every year, and they see a much dimmer prognosis. About half die from the rupture. 15 percent die before even arriving at the hospital. Of the survivors, about two-thirds suffer some permanent damage to their brains.
Other presidential candidates, besides Biden, are also trying to spin stories about their brain health. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a 2012 deposition that he’d been living with a parasitic worm in his brain.
Given the persistence of this issue, Joe Biden should be spinning it more successfully.
If he can think of a way, that is…