What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [21]
“Oh, yeah, he’s fine,” Joe said.
He did not mean fine as in healthy. He meant nothing had changed since my symptoms had first erupted. I was stable. Dad saw the void close. But he knew the situation remained grave, even if it was not deteriorating. I might be headed for brain surgery. The doctor in him knew too much about the risk of opening a skull and venturing inside with instruments. Surgery might repair the aneurysm, but collateral damage was always possible. Would I have all my functions when I left the operating room?
At least for now, I was neurologically all right and safely in a hospital, a big one, full of neurosurgeons who could react if my brain seemed to worsen. “It’s sort of like in a poker game,” Dad says, “and everything you own is on the table. That’s the bad news. The good news is, you have a pretty good hand.”
Looking back, being a pile of chips is sort of how I felt.
Now Dad, a man who deals in facts and eschews drama, did something uncharacteristic, practically superstitious. As he and Mom frantically packed to make the train that would take them to Washington, he became obsessed with finding a certain lightweight, outdoor jacket of his. It had been a gift from me, brought from the Vancouver Olympics two months earlier. He had worn it to work that morning and now felt he had to take it with him. It was a link to his son, who was in danger.
He couldn’t find it. He looked everywhere. He and Mom even drove back to their medical office to look. Not there either. They had to leave without it.
Except they didn’t, because the jacket was in Dad’s suitcase, where he himself had put it, an act that stress and uncertainty had promptly obliterated from his memory.
chapter ten
A Kiss
I was an exhausted lab rat as evening came.
Poked and drugged, scanned by huge machines. A catheter had taken a cruise through my torso, my brain had been squirted with dyes, and I hadn’t eaten since before dawn, when I got up to do MJ.
The hospital brought food of some sort, maybe soup and crackers, and I know I drank a lot of ginger ale, but nothing could overcome the sensation of having gone a thousand rounds with a battalion of heavyweights. The head pounding had entered its ninth hour. The emotional tank was on empty.
Yet I didn’t feel I could give in to fatigue. My brain couldn’t be trusted, which was a sorry thing to say about it after we had spent so many happy years together. If I shut it down for sleep, it might not restart. No one had said that; I just believed it.
I don’t remember which doctor it was, but in the past few hours one had tried to buck me up by saying a good percentage of folks with a ruptured aneurysm—if that’s what I had—go on to lead pretty normal lives.
A good percentage? That’s it? “Good” sounded like “not too many.”
My spirit did not soar.
For the first time, including Andrew’s birth, thoughts of work were not racing through my head. I didn’t care about it, which was liberating, but there wasn’t much choice. My brain could not handle anything other than its own dysfunction. There was no room to ponder what guests had been booked for tomorrow or what hot topics we might pursue. Mentally, I had to surrender as executive producer of Morning Joe.
Besides, Mika and Joe at some point had said they would not be doing MJ tomorrow. They’d leave the hosting duties to Willie Geist because they were too upset. At the time, I really didn’t believe they would skip it. But they did. In retrospect, this became part of my education. Wow, they didn’t do a show because of me? They were that concerned? The file of evidence that perhaps I worried too much was thickening.
At 5:45 P.M. on that first day, Dr. Deshmukh entered my ICU room, adding to the standing-room-only gathering. Joe, Mika, Louis, Jenny, me. The doctor was going to give a status report, and Jenny remembers he exuded calm competence. As he spoke, the reporter in Mika scribbled on