What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [20]
Louis reached Phil Griffin at 30 Rock, where he is now president of MSNBC. Phil went online to search “aneurysm” and the more he read, the worse he felt. He knew how much I loved being at the center of Morning Joe. It seemed quite possible that some sort of disability would end my career.
My sister, Stephanie, reached Marc Nespoli. My best friend—I was the best man at his wedding, he at mine—grew up to be a psychiatrist, and after he heard from Stephanie, his thoughts reverted to something that had happened during his medical training at a Vermont hospital. One of his patients, a nineteen-year-old man who was being treated for seizures, suddenly summoned nurses to his room in the middle of the night because he had “the worst headache” of his life. He died of a subarachnoid hemorrhage a short time later. In other words, unlike me, Marc knew firsthand the threat posed by a ruptured aneurysm. He, too, felt a need to get to Washington quickly.
Mike Barnicle, who had been with us on Morning Joe that morning, was at his hotel when he was called. Mike marvels at the intensity gap between newspapers, where he grew up professionally, and television, where he now lives. At his old paper, the Boston Globe, you wrote a story or column for the next day, which was stressful for a few hours, but there was no prompt verdict on the quality of your words. Circulation data didn’t arrive the next day, and even when it did, it did not offer a measurement of the worth of your story specifically, only the paper’s value as a whole.
At MJ, new ratings arrive every afternoon on my BlackBerry and up and down the corridors of 30 Rock, measuring the popularity not merely of the show, but of each eight- or ten-minute segment. Who watched at that moment? How long did they watch? Happiness or failure, Mike says, “comes right down the hallway, like an ocean wave.” He wonders how any of us handle it. Among his first thoughts now was that my brain had shorted out from the crazy intensity of network television.
It was my parents who had known about my emergency the longest, because I had called them first after my brain popped. After my call, my father the doctor and my mother the physician’s associate had gone about their day in Connecticut, not terribly worried because there was no evidence yet they should be. But then Jenny telephoned, then Mika, then Joe, and with each call things got worse. Dad and Mom decided they had to get to my bedside. Then, as they prepared to go, Joe called again.
“I just spoke with the neurosurgeon, Dr. Deshmukh,” Joe said, “and he says the situation is very serious and you should come down immediately.”
Dad couldn’t believe the phrasing Joe had used. Was he saying what it sounded like?
To Dad, you would never tell a relative on the phone that a loved one is dying. What if that relative was at the wheel of a car at that moment? What if she was in the kitchen, fainted, and hit her head on the counter?
No, you would euphemize until you could tell the relative face-to-face and provide comfort and assistance. You would keep it vague on the phone, not saying death was imminent, but saying only that things were serious. As Joe just had.
Was he deliberately resorting to this sort of compassionate haze to avoid saying I was dying? Or had he inadvertently chosen a wording not realizing how a doctor might interpret it? For a moment—perhaps the worst of his life, he said later—Dad saw a void opening beneath his feet. He might not be able to handle what seemed to be happening, the death of his son.
“Hold it,” he said to Joe. “You have just seen Chris. Is there any difference whatsoever in how he is from the time he went into the hospital to the time you last saw him?”
Joe would have to be specific now. Either I could still talk coherently, as I could when I had called Dad a few hours before and