What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [23]
Even if there was no aneurysm and I never re-bled, there was one last serious matter.
The blood already there.
Until it was absorbed, it was an irritant. I heard that a lot. An irritant. Apparently, the renegade blood could irritate me into a stroke by causing my healthy arteries to spasm, and the most likely time frame for that was between five and ten days from now. I was to start taking a pill every two hours, nimodipine, whose purpose was to prevent arterial spasms.
Dr. Deshmukh recalls that at some point during his briefing, I asked whether I would be able to go back to work. “This is a guy who’s accustomed to go, go, go, four in the morning to whatever late hours in the day,” he says. I didn’t seem concerned I might never be able to do my job again, he says. It was more that my schedule had blown up. He knows the type. “They want to go back to work right away, and they don’t like being in the hospital and they don’t like taking time off.”
No, we don’t.
So that’s where things stood. Possible re-bleeds? Possible spasms? I was in more precarious shape than I had thought.
And the day wasn’t done.
Though I finally felt ready to succumb to sleep, I had to endure one more test.
Sometimes, the culprit in cases like mine is a tumor in the brain or on the spinal cord that ruptures and releases blood, mimicking the symptoms of a ruptured aneurysm. Dr. Deshmukh didn’t think that’s what had happened to me, but he wanted to rule it out. The test is a long one involving an MRI, and most patients hate it.
I hated it.
They held off this test until Mom and Dad arrived, well into the night now, coming directly from the train station, where they had been picked up by an NBC car. Willie Geist, who had not been with us on the trip to Washington, had come from New York on the same train, and remembers thinking as he walked in how vulnerable I looked, hooked to monitors, pale, whipped. It was so not me, he thought.
Agreed.
I thought I saw tears in Mom’s eyes. Dad, knowing how much I like to control things, knew that being in this whole mess would drive me crazy. He was about to be so right.
I was wheeled away to another suite, put on another hard-surface slab, and once again slid into a machine. This one clicked relentlessly, loudly. I was not medicated this time because the test was not invasive. I was much more aware than during the cerebral angiogram.
As I lay there for twenty minutes, thirty, listening to the clicking, silently objecting to my lack of command over anything in my life right now, the whole day rose up and punched me. There was no good to any of this. Everything sucked. The brain bleed, the tests, the fatigue, the disruption, the inability to find the thing in my head. All sucked. Why I thought there should be some good in all this, I don’t know, but I found none. The thoughts were precursors of much bigger, darker ones that would descend upon me in a week. I lay there silently in the MRI machine with nothing to do but indulge my irritation.
Why does the slab have to be so hard? Who fucking designed this thing to be that hard? We can put someone on the moon and this machine has to be so loud I can’t even hear myself think? And, honestly, how long does it take to do a map of my brain?
Then I was silent no longer.
“Enough!” I yelled. “Done!”
When I got back from the MRI, Mom and Dad and Jenny were still in my room. It was late now. My parents would spend the night at a hotel NBC had found for them and would pay for. Jenny would have to leave soon, too; hospital rules. As my parents began to go, Dad stopped and returned to my bed. He bent close to my ear, and whispered.
“I absolutely fucking guarantee you that you will be all right,” he said.
He didn’t know if I had heard this, because I seemed so tired and beaten up. But I remember his vow now. It gave me hope. Dad never lies. Dad never coddles. If he was promising I was going to be all right, then I was going to