Jill Biden Reveals She Screamed at Priest Administering Joe Biden’s Last Rites During Health Scare

Former First Lady Jill Biden said she screamed at a priest to get out of the hospital room when her husband, former President Joe Biden, suffered a life-threatening brain aneurysm in February 1988. She details this intense moment in her memoir, View From the East Wing, as well as in a previous biography.

Following the conclusion of his first presidential campaign in 1988, then-Sen. Biden, 46, was rushed to a hospital in Wilmington, Del. Doctors discovered blood in his spinal fluid, indicating a ruptured brain aneurysm that required immediate, highly risky surgery.

Jill arrived at the hospital room right as a Catholic priest was preparing to administer — or had just started reading — the last rites (the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick).

"I rushed to his side and learned he’d had an aneurysm," Jill wrote in her memoir.

Stunned and terrified by the realization that doctors thought he might die, she immediately went into a protective panic. She recounts screaming at the priest, "Get out! Get out! My husband is not going to die!"

The 74-year-old former FLOTUS later noted that she rarely yells, and the sheer volume and anger in her own voice shocked her almost as much as they shocked the priest.

Following the initial confrontation, Joe was deemed too unstable to be flown due to the severity of the aneurysm.

He had to be transferred via an emergency ambulance ride to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where he successfully underwent life-saving neurosurgery.

After she eventually calmed down a bit, Jill revealed that she had attempted to lighten the mood, joking to her husband, "Way to ruin the holiday."

As lighthearted as that incident was, the former First Couple is facing another health scare, this time as Joe battles stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer, a diagnosis Jill said was "just shocking.”

Jill described the diagnosis — which occurred in May 2025, after the then-82-year-old 46th POTUS left office — as completely unexpected. She noted that our "whole life has changed now" as they pivoted from planning retirement travels to navigating advanced cancer.

When asked on The View if she still believed her husband could have served another four years had he stayed in the 2024 presidential race, she responded, "Not from what I know now," despite also saying she was confident her husband would have beaten Donald Trump if he stayed in the race.

She revealed that White House medical teams missed the cancer because they followed standard American Urological Association guidelines, which discourage routine Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) screenings for men over the age of 70.

As a result, the disease went undetected until it reached an advanced stage. She has since publicly urged older men to monitor their bodies and request testing.

Because the cancer metastasized to his bones, it is no longer considered curable, though it remains treatable. Jill stated realistically, "I think Joe will live with cancer for the rest of his life.”