US President Joe Biden has once again displayed his trademark sense of humor as he recalled how firefighters helped save his life years ago. While a brain aneurysm is no laughing matter, the president's joke was not about the medical condition itself but rather about his own experience with it.
Speaking at the International Association of Fire Fighters Legislative Conference on Monday, Biden reminisced about an episode from 1988 when his fire company helped him get to Walter Reed medical center amid a raging snowstorm to receive surgery for a brain aneurysm – surgery that saved the future president's life.
"I came back from a trip, after being away for a couple of days, and — I had these terrible headaches. I was diagnosed with having a — well, anyway," Biden said. "They had to take the top of my head off a couple times, see if I had a brain."
Joe Biden does appear to have a rather peculiar sense of humor that sometimes results in him catching flak online.
For example, last week the POTUS chuckled while deflecting blame for the deaths of two young people who perished due to a fentanyl overdose in the US, with Biden arguing that the drug that killed them came into the country “during the last administration."
This time, however, Biden joked basically at his own expense, and it seems unlikely that his remark about a personal experience with brain aneurysm would be regarded as offensive by others.
Brain Aneurysm, the Sneaky Killer
While the president felt okay to joke about his surgery, the medical issue he had at the time is exceptionally serious, as almost 500,000 people die from it each year.
A brain aneurysm occurs when a weakened wall of a blood vessel in the brain bulges out, filling with blood. While they normally do not produce any symptoms at this stage, a sufficiently large aneurysm may press against nerves and brain tissue, causing symptoms such as headache or visual disturbances.
When a brain aneurysm ruptures – which, thankfully, does not happen in every case – the consequences of the ensuing brain hemorrhage and the resulting brain injury are often fatal (in about 50 percent of cases, according to the Brain Aneurysm Foundation).
Some of these deaths occur within only a few hours of the rupture, with 15 percent of the afflicted dying before they reach the hospital.
Many of those who manage to survive this ordeal also do not emerge unscathed, with nearly two thirds of them suffering some permanent form of brain damage.