Biden Jokes About His 2 Aneurysm Surgeries: Doctors ‘Couldn’t Find a Brain the First Time’

“I was making a speech and I had a terrible headac- — (coughs) — excuse me — a terrible headache.  And — sorry — (takes a sip of water) — (coughs) — I swallowed wrong,” Biden said:

“I had a terrible headache. This was years ago. And I did a very stupid thing: I got on an aircraft and I flew home. It turned out I had two cranial aneurysms, and I got rushed to a hospital in the middle of a snowstorm for a nine-and-a-half-hour operation that saved my life.

“Then I had the second operation; they found an aneurysm on the other side of my brain. I joke: The reason they went in twice to take the top of my head off is because they couldn’t find a brain the first time.” (His audience laughed.)

“And in between,” Biden continued, “I had a major embolism that almost killed me. Nothing unusual that other people haven’t gone through.  But I look back on it, and I don’t think you nurses are nearly appreciated enough.

“What I found was: You lie in the ICU — and I have not said this publicly before — and you look at the monitors, and you know if the line goes flat, you’re dead. You don’t know what each monitor is, but you know.  And I really mean it — it’s true.  But you just get tired.  Even when you’re not in pain, you just want to quit.

“And the nurses at Walter Reed Hospital would come up, they’d rub my face, they’d whisper in my ear.  They’d get close and tell me, ‘It’s going to be okay.’ They made a difference in my life.”

Biden also compared Irish Catholics to the Palestinians:

“I — my background and the background of my family is Irish American, and we have a long history of — not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish-Catholics over the years, for 400 years.”