What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [1]
Now came something else. It was as if a glass of water had tipped up there and spilled its contents; only this didn’t feel like a liquid, just a sensation of movement inside, from the back of my head toward the front. Now someone clamped a vise around my skull. Now someone tightened the vise with sadistic gusto, evidently striving for a pain number so far above ten it would merit a Guinness entry.
My body’s inventiveness and the speed of its transformation were bewildering, and darkly impressive. In the time it takes to listen to a voice mail, which is what I had been doing, it had mustered a vicious headache. I was having a unique event, which I normally enjoy. Olympics? Worked several, loved them. Super Bowls, World Series, national political conventions, A-list receptions, book parties, movie screenings, all cool. This, absolutely not.
I was suddenly in the bizarre position of thinking about what was going wrong with the thing doing my thinking. My brain was trying to diagnose its own malfunction.
Was this a stroke?
In any television producer’s career, especially if he comes up through local news, he usually does enough stories about “Stroke Awareness Month” or similar causes that he comes to know the warning signs by heart. I did. I ran down the list.
Fingers movable?
Yes.
Vision blurred?
No.
Words slurred?
“There’s a lot of traffic,” I said.
Sounded smooth.
I said this to the only other person around, the driver of a black Cadillac Escalade into whose rear seat I had dropped a few minutes before, back in my healthy era.
Everything seemed to be working properly except, of course, my head. I knew where I was, on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. I knew when it was, Wednesday, April 28, 2010. So it seemed reasonable to conclude tomorrow’s newspaper would not feature an obituary noting the passing of MSNBC’s Christopher A. Licht, 38, husband of Jenny and father of Andrew, twenty months.
Which was comforting, but this still really, really hurt.
In the minutes preceding the pop, I was fine. I had never been an addict, never had surgery, never been rushed to an emergency room, needed no medications, was not overweight, had excellent blood pressure, never smoked, was filled with energy and confidence. Stress? No doubt there was stress. I was in live television, from 6 to 9 A.M. Eastern, five days a week, as the executive producer of a show called Morning Joe. Everybody in television has stress. The medium overflows with its ingredients. Money. Egos. Instant ratings. Constant deadlines. But I thrived on being MJ’s executive producer.
Having ruled out stroke, I was out of theories. I abandoned voice mail and dialed for help. Not to my wife, because telling her about the vise gripping my head without knowing why it was doing so would upset her without offering solace. Jenny has no medical background; like me, she’s in television. And she was in New York City, where we live, and could hardly swing by in a few minutes to commiserate in the back of this SUV. I called Dad.
Peter Licht is a doctor, an internist. He and my mother, Susan, who is a physician’s associate, work in the same medical office and still live in the house in Connecticut where I grew up with my sister, Stephanie. Until now, I had never called either parent about a medical emergency that I myself was suffering. But Dad is a man of no bull and no drama, and he never coddles and never overreacts. Once, in my teens, at camp in Florida, I took a tumble while barefoot waterskiing and damaged an eardrum. A local doctor prescribed major pain meds, really serious stuff. Dad declared this was nonsense, take two aspirin. If my super-headache was nothing, he’d say so. If it was something, he’d say that.
Dad didn’t answer his cell. I called the house.
Mom was surprised I was in Washington because mostly we’re in New York, at 30 Rockefeller Center, 30 Rock. But Washington is where our