Former President Bill Clinton was released from a Southern California hospital Sunday after having battled an infection.
“His fever and white blood cells count are normalized and he will return home to New York to finish his course of antibiotics. On behalf of everyone at UC Irvine Medical Center, we were honored to have treated him and will continue to monitor his progress,” Dr. Alpesh N. Amin, the chair of the medicine department and executive director of hospital medicine at UC Irvine Health, said in a statement.
Clinton was admitted Tuesday after he was diagnosed with a urological infection that had spread to his bloodstream, a source with knowledge of the situation said Friday.
His wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea Clinton, were by his side at the hospital, the source said. Bill and Hillary Clinton had been scheduled to attend a private Clinton Foundation event in California on Thursday evening.
Clinton was reported to have been up and moving during his stay at UC Irvine Medical Center.
Clinton’s hospital stay was extended because he was receiving his medication intravenously, not orally, said Angel Ureña, his spokesman. A source close to Clinton said he had been in intensive care because the hospital needed to isolate him, not because his care required it.
Clinton’s doctors, Amin and Lisa Bardack, said in a statement that “after two days of treatment, his white blood cell count is trending down and he is responding to antibiotics well.”
Clinton has had several heart operations at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
In 2004, he underwent a quadruple bypass operation to reroute his blood supply to circumvent four severely clogged arteries, The New York Times reported at the time. Clinton had complained of chest pains and shortness of breath. A team of surgeons found extensive signs of heart disease, with blockages in some of Clinton’s arteries at well over 90 percent, The Times reported.
In 2010, Clinton went back to New York-Presbyterian Hospital to undergo another heart procedure, this time to insert two stents into a coronary artery.