What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [10]
Solely because of Morning Joe, I had become friendly with Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, which until recently was NBC’s parent company. He had been advising me about my career. Would such a relationship have ever developed if I had stayed in local television? Probably not. Would it continue if I was no longer with MJ? Unlikely. If fired, I might wind up out of the loop at some backwater news show for nonplayers, the failures. That was my fear.
It’s no surprise, then, that in the rhythm of our day, I could go volcanic, firing off profanity-infused e-mails to those below me, often about minor things. I picked fights, too, just to mark territory. I had been working on being less prickly. Welch had told me to give more hugs if I wanted to keep doing big things, and I had been. But self-rehab is a long, slow process.
On the morning of April 28, 2010, I was about to unload on someone in my usual way. I was listening to a voice mail on my BlackBerry about MSNBC’s transportation arrangements for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, three days away. We had a big table at the dinner, which is the journo-politico meal of the year. The voice mail blathered on about which of our big names would get which drivers to take them to and from the dinner.
It was already a bad day; Joe and I had had a disagreement during the show, a testy one, about camera angles. Mika had even written Joe a note while they were on the air saying, Take it easy on the guy. Now came this silly, silly issue. Cars. Drivers.
Why am I getting a phone call about this? Do people know how much bigger stuff I have to deal with? Does anybody know what I have to put up with?
I would have called someone about the nonsense. I would have dropped a generous dollop of profanity upon them in my dismissive, asshole way.
I would have.
But my brain went pop.
chapter five
Free Fall
The new doctor, the one who had just arrived in my cubicle, was Ryanne Mayersak, and she was in her fourth year as an emergency-room attending physician, the supervisor in charge of the other doctors during a shift. Actually, this was her second visit to me. The first had come after Migraine Doctor left but before Louis arrived, and Dr. Mayersak had done neurological tests on me similar to those everybody else had done or would do. She had even given me her educated guess about what my CAT scan would show.
I have no memory of her initial visit. It is a reflection of how badly things unfolded in the next few moments that my brain wound up deleting an entire encounter with a doctor who was giving critical information.
As she entered for what I thought was the first time, Dr. Mayersak saw I now had a visitor, and she assumed he was not family. (Louis had gotten as far into the ER as he had by saying he was my cousin.) Doctors don’t usually give sensitive information to anyone but the patient and his relatives. I told her not to worry about Louis.
“Whatever you have to say, say it.”
She delivers a lot of bad news in the emergency room and has found that the best route is not an oblique one, but straight ahead. A patient needs to start processing it, adapting to it, and thinking of questions about it. There I lay on the hospital bed, waiting.
“We’ve looked at your CAT scan,” Dr. Mayersak said, “and you have a significant amount of bleeding in your brain.”
A word apparently swam into my consciousness, a word with the impact of a dropped anvil, because Dr. Mayersak thinks this exchange may have happened next:
“Do I have an aneurysm?”
“That’s possible.”
I couldn’t breathe.
Most of us don’t know the causes of aneurysms or their treatment, and I certainly didn’t, but I knew right away I was in deep trouble. Blood had escaped