First Lady Jill Biden will be undergoing preventative skin cancer surgery next week.

Biden’s press secretary Vanessa Valdivia made the announcement in a January 4 Twitter post.

“During a routine skin care screening, a small lesion was found above the First Lady’s right eye,” she wrote. “Memo here from Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Physician to the President, with more information on the First Lady’s upcoming outpatient procedure to have it removed and examined.”

O’Connor’s memo, included in Valdivia’s tweet, shined more light on the situation. “In an abundance of caution, doctors have recommended that it be removed,” the doctor said. He also noted that the First Lady is scheduled to have “a common outpatient procedure known as Mohs surgery to remove and definitively examine the tissue.”

“We will offer an update after the procedure is completed and we have more information,” O’Connor wrote.

According to the memo, Biden’s surgery will take place on January 11 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

“As promised, I will keep your office appraised of any changes in her condition or treatment plan,” the Physician to the President concluded.

Biden, who has previously lost her friend Winnie, her son Beau Biden and her mother Bonny Jean Jacobs to cancer, has made it her mission in the White House to battle the disease.

When she launched the moonshot program, a plan to improve cancer treatement and reduce deaths from cancer by 50 percent over the next 25 years, Biden gave heartfelt remarks. “It’s not just patients; cancer changes everyone it touches,” she reflected at the time.

Biden continued, “And in some ways, it touches us all. For Joe and me, it has stolen our joy. It left us broken in our grief. But through that pain, we found purpose, strengthening our fortitude for this fight to end cancer as we know it.”

Read more about:
avatar

Article by Ilana Frost

Leave a comment

Subscribe to the uInterview newsletter