What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [13]
She was all over her cell phone, calling the hospital CEO, calling hospital public relations officials, calling Jenny, calling Mom and Dad, reaching out to anyone who might help in the saving of me. She never stopped dialing.
Mika and Joe were swirling like superheroes who had arrived to confront the arch-villain in my head and to beat him senseless. They were becoming my executive producers. Just as I did for them and the show every morning, they had put on headsets of a sort and were working to make me come out right.
Mika pointed at her chest, then her butt.
“Mommy,” she said, “is kicking ass.”
My head was still pounding. I had no idea whether my brain was still bleeding. My wife was still a couple of hundred miles away. But this, this flattening of doors and taking of names, was starting to sink deeply into my heart.
So this is how much they care.
I could tell this wasn’t Joe simply reverting to Congressman Scarborough. He wasn’t making an obligatory stop to give a hospitalized constituent his best wishes for a full recovery and, after a two-minute visit, moving on to a ribbon cutting at a Pensacola strip mall. He was in this fight. He cared far more than I had assumed.
In the days ahead, as I lay in my hospital bed, I would get short e-mails from him that said nothing more than Call me if you get bored or We miss you very much. They were good enough to keep, and I have.
During these first hours I wasn’t worried about Jenny, Andrew, or the future. There were no ruminations about how and why this event had happened. That would come later. By swooping in and taking charge, Mika and Joe had freed me to focus on the present task, which was fixing the problem. How do we do that? How do I get out of this? Who do we call, what doctor do I need? It was as self-centered as I had ever been.
Mika and Joe were aware that until now I had been the beneficiary of good fortune all my life. Not enough emotional pain had been inflicted, they sensed, to bequeath perspective and serenity as I went about my job. I was too young and too lucky to carry scars. Now change was coming. A transformation had begun in the backseat of the Escalade, and accelerated in C2B. A driven, focused, charmed man had been knocked to the floor by something no one saw coming.
“Usually, bad experiences, if you can survive them, are the best things that can happen to you,” Mika says.
If you can survive them.
Joe, at my bedside, had an idea. He turned to Mika.
“Hey, do you have Joe’s phone number on your cell?”
Joe Biden’s, that is.
chapter seven
The Doctor
On the morning of my event, as we’ll call it, Dr. Vivek Deshmukh, one of the most skilled neurosurgeons in the country, had yet to assume his current top medical post in Portland, Oregon. That wouldn’t happen for four months. So as I lay on my bed in C2B, Dr. Deshmukh was across the street in a clinic affiliated with George Washington, in a closed consultation room where he was seeing a patient. An assistant interrupted to announce a phone call. She was insistent. Dr. Deshmukh excused himself and stepped out to one of the clinic’s workstations.
“Hello, Doctor. Vice President Biden would like to speak to you.”
He had never met Biden. He had never spoken with him. He did recognize Biden’s voice, however, and was understandably amazed to find himself chatting with the second most powerful man on the planet on an otherwise mundane Wednesday.
“I know you’re real busy,” the vice president began. “I don’t want to take up too much of your time because, unlike me, you’re doing consequential things.”
Dr. Deshmukh was impressed by the self-deprecating humor.
“I have a good friend in your ER,” Biden went on, “and could you make time to see him? I’ve called around and asked many people who should be taking care of him, and everyone I’ve talked to has said you’re the best doctor to take care of it.”
The friend had bleeding in his brain, Biden said. He gave my name.
Not only did Dr. Deshmukh not know Biden personally, I didn’t know Biden personally. He was not my friend, though I