Biden once nearly died of an aneurysm. Risky surgery changed his life.

[former9thward]

Decades ago, Biden’s condition was misdiagnosed as a pinched nerve. His survival helps explain the 81-year-old’s motivations today.

Joe Biden awoke suddenly in his hotel room, curled up on the floor and fully clothed, and felt an electric surge inside his head, “a rip of pain like I never felt before,” as he later recalled. It was 4:10 a.m. on a winter day in 1988.

The debilitating headaches had been happening for nearly a year, interrupting his first presidential campaign as the 45-year-old Biden popped up to 10 Tylenols a day. He had been diagnosed with a pinched nerve and for a time wore a cervical collar. Now, as he lay on the floor of his hotel room in Rochester, N.Y., the pain was even worse. His legs felt dead, and he struggled to turn his head.

Instead of heading to an emergency room, Biden flew home with an aide to Wilmington, Del., where he tried to get some sleep. Awakened hours later by even greater pain, he rushed to St. Francis Hospital. It wasn’t a pinched nerve. Doctors found blood in his spinal fluid, and then a dangerous balloon-shaped bulge — an aneurysm — on an artery wall at the base of the brain. Even worse, Biden’s aneurysm had already burst, leaking blood around the base of his brain.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/14/biden-nearly-died-an-aneurysm-risky-surgery-changed-his-life/