Biden claims he had a nurse who would whisper in his ear and BREATHE on him

President Joe Biden awkwardly gushed about the good treatment he received from the nurses at Walter Reed during a healthcare event in Virginia Beach, Virginia on Tuesday.

At the top of his speech Biden gave a shout-out to nurses and talked about how well he was cared for when he was hospitalized in 1988 for two life-threatening brain aneurysms.  

'I had a nurse named Pearl Nelson. She'd come in and do things I don't think you learn in nursing school,' he said to laughs. 'She'd whisper in my ear, I couldn't understand, but she'd whisper and she'd lean down. And actually breathe on me to make sure there was a connection, a human connection.'

Nelson, Biden said, even went home and grabbed a pillow off her bed because the then-U.S. senator found the one assigned to him not very comfortable. 

He said to the medical professionals in the crowd, 'You docs are good, but if there's any angels in heaven, they're the nurses, male and female.' 

President Joe Biden awkwardly gushed about the good treatment he received from the nurses at Walter Reed during a healthcare event in Virginia Beach, Virginia on Tuesday

He opened up his speech by directly addressing medical professionals in the crowd. 'You docs are good, but if there's any angels in heaven, they're the nurses, male and female' 

'You know why?' he asked. 'You guys allow us to live, nurses make you want to live.'   

'I'm not joking,' he continued. 'You lie there in the ICU, which I've done for a long time, and you look at those machines. And you know the line goes flat that it's over. But you just get tired, you don't care.'

He credited the nursing staff at Walter Reed for making him want to live again. 

'You're so underestimated,' Biden added, after also praising the nurses who stood at his son Beau's bedside as he was dying from glioblastoma.  

Biden told a similar tale when he was committing $100 million in U.S. funding for healthcare services to an East Jerusalem hospital that serves the Palestinian population during his trip to the Middle East in July. 

He asked then, 'Are there any nurses in the room?' 

'Because if not, I'm going home,' the president said to laughs.

He recalled how his first wife and baby daughter were killed in a Christmastime car crash.

'And my boys were trapped in a vehicle for three hours when a tractor-trailer hit them,' Biden said. 'The doctor saved their lives, but the nurses made them want to live.'

The president talked about his own healthcare challenges, the double aneurysms with an embolism on top of that.  

'I joked the reason they went in twice to take the top of my head off is they couldn't find a brain the first time,' Biden said. 

In a more serious tone he added, 'I don't think you nurses are nearly appreciated enough.'

He recalled being in the intensive care unit - saying he had never made these comments publicly before. 

'And you look at the monitors and you know if the line goes flat you're dead,' the president said. '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, and they'd rub my face, they'd whisper in my ear. They'd get close and tell me, it's going to be OK. They made a difference in my life,' he said. 

Biden dedicated the bulk of Tuesday's speech to warning that Republicans wanted to cut Medicaid and meddle with Obamacare to meet their budgetary demands. 

The president has spent weeks bashing Republicans over Sen. Rick Scott's plan to 'sunset' legislation every five years, which Biden said included Medicare and Social Security.