What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [11]
I fought tears.
There’s a well-worn aphorism that all too often we don’t recognize the crucial moments until much later, as they recede in the rearview mirror. This one had announced itself with a jackboot to the gut. In this antiseptic, windowless room, in this big Washington hospital, with Louis standing there but my wife and son in New York, my life was pivoting toward a new compass point. I had free-ranging blood in my brain. There was no way I would come out of this the same.
Just a short time earlier, I had been doing a national television show in perfect health. Then, after experiencing sharp pain, I had been safely diagnosed with a migraine. I was out of there. I was done with the hospital. While migraines are unpleasant, I had been told things were, if not fine, then manageable. Now they were very much not fine, they were dangerously wrong. It was like being tricked.
“This is a critical situation,” Dr. Mayersak said.
I was in the right place, she said. You’ll get the best care. The neurological team had been paged and was on its way and would answer my questions. If I had any right now, she could try to help. The question I came up with reflected the condition of a man whose circuits were being scrambled by profound distress, because it was so deeply trivial and dumb.
“So you’re admitting me?”
New thoughts came. I clearly hadn’t died, but people with aneurysms don’t walk out of hospitals the next day. We’re just getting started here. More was coming. My schedule, all those places I had to be and people I had to see, all confidently recorded in the BlackBerry that now slept in the clear plastic bag, had been blown up and replaced by the unknown.
My immediate future would be here, in this hospital. The master of Control Room 3A had no control in C2B. He could not fix the problem he faced, because this was not the familiar terrain of live television but a place where he was dependent upon neurologists who were coming to treat him and he had no idea how that was done. How could this be happening? Don’t they know I am exempt from this sort of thing?
It was the greatest shock of my life.
Not since pneumonia sent my son to an emergency room when he was seven weeks old had I felt as powerless. Actually, I felt more powerless than I did then. I wasn’t an observer here, as I was when Andrew was hospitalized. It was me in the bed this time, not me standing beside it. My brain, my future.
To Dr. Mayersak, Louis looked more stunned than I did. He had imagined his producer was merely suffering from too much coffee or too few vitamins, and would be up and on his way. Louis’s stomach had dropped at the mention of bleeding, in part because he had been working at NBC’s Washington bureau on the day in 2008 when Meet the Press host Tim Russert had collapsed and died. Now Louis roped his emotions back into place.
“You’re going to be okay, Chris,” he said. “I promise. You’re going to be okay.”
“I know. I’m just scared. This is really scary.”
He reached out and took my hand.
“Thanks, man.”
“Breathe,” he said.
chapter six
The Superheroes
At the Marriott Wardman Park hotel, as I learned later, Mika seized Joe’s arm as he stepped off the stage, his speech now done. In three years together on the air, Mika and Joe have had quite a few low points and tribulations, but he had never seen the depth of apprehension now sketched on her face.
“We have to go,” she said. “Louis says Chris has an aneurysm.”
“Chris has a brain aneurysm? Our Chris?”
“Yes, our Chris. We have to go now.”
In the car to George Washington, Joe kept repeating his disbelieving question, “Our Chris?” Otherwise, they rode in paralyzed silence. Mika thought the news could kill Joe. She thought the aneurysm could kill me. She saw me as so chronically healthy and resilient, no matter how much she and Joe got on my case about decisions or miscues. Now my head was way wrong. She