What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [15]
After finishing with his patient in the consultation room at the clinic, he scampered across Twenty-third Street to the main building, into the ER, and down to the CAT suite. The second test would be done with contrasting dyes, the better to see my arteries. I had been delivered there before he arrived. It was sometime around noon.
I have no memory of this moment. I apparently have erased it just as I did Dr. Mayersak’s first visit to me. As I lay on a table that would slide inside the CAT machine, Dr. Deshmukh asked me to describe what had happened and how I felt now. He asked if I had any allergies, surgeries, or medical problems.
Now came another variation of the already familiar neurological quiz.
What is your name?
Where are you?
Do you know what year it is?
I knew the answers, knew them all, and that was good at least. Except for the head pain and the initial scan that showed considerable bleeding, the doctor concluded I was an otherwise healthy young man who was aware he was in trouble, but not catatonic or fidgeting or wailing with grief. Stoic, he thought.
Into the machine I went. Into my arm through an IV went the contrast solution. The hunt for my aneurysm was on. The CAT machine began methodically imaging my head in slices 2.5mm wide. Dr. Deshmukh examined the images, one after another.
Nothing. No aneurysm.
Yet there was so much blood. That much almost always means an aneurysm.
Where is it?
A doctor wants to get inside and repair the artery. But he has to find the scene of the microscopic disaster first. Dr. Deshmukh feared he was missing something. If he sent a patient home without finding the aneurysm, it could rupture again, perhaps fatally. Mine should be easy to find, yet there was no evidence of it.
The doctor wanted the next level of test, the gold standard, a cerebral angiogram, a test that makes possible a much higher degree of magnification of the arteries. We were entering a phase of the afternoon I do remember.
I was taken upstairs to the “angio suite,” a chilly, sterile room with multiple monitors and a machine that seemed as big as a Buick. As I was wheeled in, there were people milling about. One pointed down at me on the hospital bed and mouthed to the others a single word, “Biden.”
Joe and Mika had told me they were reaching out to the vice president. Now I was seeing the results. Now I was becoming a celebrity, which wasn’t all that unusual for a hospital in the same neighborhood as the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the embassies of dozens of nations, and most cabinet-level departments of the government.
I had no problem with the special attention. When your head feels as if someone has put a belt around it and yanked with both hands, when they’ve told you that you might have an aneurysm, when your emotions have careened into unexplored lands, you want special attention. You want somebody to make a call if that somebody knows somebody.
The hospital, in any event, probably would have reacted to my case in precisely the same way even if Biden had never gotten involved. In the emergency room, Dr. Mayersak hadn’t known he would be, yet she had sounded the neurological claxon as soon as she had the proof. Dr. Deshmukh might have been summoned anyway.
In the angio suite, they seemed to be in a good mood, which helped me. The anesthesiologist announced she would be my cocktail waitress. The guy who was going to shave my right leg as part of the procedure noted he was providing a bikini waxing. I was counting on this test. I wanted to be told the bleeding had stopped. I didn’t know anything about aneurysms, but I assumed unchecked bleeding could not be good.
My leak almost certainly had stopped already, though, which Dr. Deshmukh now told me. Ruptures tend to be quick affairs. The aneurysm seals itself. But that might not last. A re-rupture at any time is possible. That’s why it was important to find the spot.
A consent form was put in front of me. I hesitated.
During a cerebral angiogram, an incision is made in the patient’s leg, and a small-diameter catheter