Former president George H.W. Bush was hospitalized Sunday morning “after contracting an infection that spread to his blood,” a family spokesman said.
Bush, 93, was admitted to Houston Methodist Hospital just one day after his wife, former first lady Barbara Bush, was laid to rest, said spokesman Jim McGrath. The 41st president is responding to treatments and appears to be recovering, he said.
Barbara Bush died Tuesday at age 92, two days after he family announced that she had “decided not to seek additional medical treatment” after recent hospitalizations amid her “failing health.” Her husband, whose own health has been declining, sat in his wheelchair in front of her casket at her funeral Saturday, greeting mourners for 20 minutes.
Bush has been battling a form of Parkinson’s disease, and has needed hospital care several times in recent years because of respiratory problems. He also suffered from Graves’s disease – a thyroid ailment – during his presidency. He remains America’s longest-living president, having surpassed Gerald Ford, who died at 93 years and 165 days, last November.
Bush would turn 94 in June.
In 2012, he was hospitalized for a bronchitis-related cough, spending two months at the hospital, some of it in intensive care. He was hospitalized after experiencing shortness of breath in 2014, and again in 2015 after falling at his Kennebunkport, Maine, home and breaking a bone in his neck. He recovered quickly.
He was hospitalized for 16 days in January 2017 for pneumonia, which included time in the intensive care unit. In April 2017, he was hospitalized for two weeks for a mild case of pneumonia and chronic bronchitis.
CNN reported that Bush was admitted to the hospital on Sunday with an infection that led to sepsis, which at his age can be life-threatening. Bush was in critical condition, experiencing drops in his blood pressure, which raised concerns of whether he’d come through, CNN reported. He has since been stabilized.
Bush served two terms as vice president under Ronald Reagan and then one as president, from 1989 to 1993. As president, he oversaw the end of the Cold War, and the U.S. and its allies’ swift defeat of Iraq in the Persian Gulf War.