Joe Biden had blood in his spinal fluid and a leaking 'balloon-shaped' aneurysm below the base of his brain. His situation was so serious his wife Jill had been told not to enter his hospital room as the devout Catholic was read the Last Rites.
It was February 1988, and only a few months earlier, the then 45-year-old had dramatically pulled out of his first bid for the US presidency. Now he had been rushed to the operating theatre in Wilmington, Delaware, with agonising neck pain.
Thanks to the interventions of his doctors, Biden survived. It later emerged he'd kept quiet about the debilitating headaches he'd been suffering from for the past year, and which had reduced him to carrying around a large bottle of Tylenol [paracetamol] painkiller.
As Jill told him at the time, it was just as well he'd pulled out of the Democratic nomination battle against Michael Dukakis to fight George HW Bush.
Otherwise he might have been campaigning when his aneurysm started bleeding and he would likely have tried to push on regardless, with fatal consequences.
