Biden set for annual physical: Inside the 80-year-old president’s health history

Six months after he was forced to quarantine after testing positive for Covid-19, President Joe Biden is set to have his annual physical examination.

The president will travel to Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre on Thursday for an exam at the hands of Physician to the President Dr Kevin O’Connor, a former US Army physician who has treated Mr Biden since 2009, when he was sworn in as vice president during Dr O’Connor’s time serving in the White House Medical Unit.

Mr Biden, the oldest person to be sworn in for a first term as president, is by most accounts in extremely good health for someone his age. He regularly exercises, is considered to have a healthy Body Mass Index, and was described by his doctor as a “healthy, vigorous” male who is “fit to execute the duties of the presidency” in a 2019 statement.

Dr O’Connor said in a statement issued last year that Mr Biden remains healthy and vigorous, with some stiffness in his gait attributed to spinal arthritis.

Before his Covid-19 diagnosis last year, the most serious health problem Mr Biden has faced since winning the 2020 election has been a broken foot, endured while playing with one of his German Shepherd dogs. But the president’s health has not always been as robust.

Twice in the 1980s, Mr Biden had near-death experiences which required him to undergo brain surgery two times within five months.

He described them in a speech he delivered last week in a Jerusalem hospital.

“I was making a speech and 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,” he recalled, describing the February 1988 trip to Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, then in Northwest Washington DC.

Mr Biden’s plane ride came after he’d passed out in a hotel following a speech at the University of Rochester.

In his 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep, Mr Biden wrote that he recalled having "lightning flashing inside my head, a powerful electrical surge — and then a rip of pain like I'd never felt before”.

At Walter Reed, he was told he needed surgery, with only a 50-50 change he’d live through the procedure.

"Maybe I should have been frightened at this point, but I felt calm," he wrote. "In fact, I felt becalmed, like I was floating gently in the wide-open sea. It surprised me, but I had no real fear of dying. I'd long since accepted the fact that life's guarantees don't include a fair shake."

But he did survive, and three months later he underwent a similar procedure to fix another, smaller aneurysm on the opposite side from the first.

According to The Daily Beast, Mr Biden made a last-minute request of the surgeon, Dr Neal Kassell, as he was being wheeled in for the procedure.

“He looked me in the eye and said: ‘Doc, do a good job, because someday I’m going to be president,’” Dr Kassell said in November 2020, just days after Mr Biden’s prediction finally became reality.