What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [26]
“How are you feeling right now, Chris,” Joe said, “and how are they treating you at GW?”
For a nanosecond, I stammered slightly, then got going.
“I feel a lot better. Really turned the corner yesterday, and they couldn’t be treating me any better, which is largely because Mika got on the phone and you got on the phone, and they’ve just been amazing here.”
My voice was finding its stride.
“A lot of outpouring, which has really helped, and I will say I don’t think the ICU has seen anything like you two last night before the dinner.”
Mika and Joe had shown the television audience photos of themselves in their formalwear visiting my room, Mika draped across my bed and leaning in to give a kiss. My face was cherry with embarrassment.
“I know this will shock you, Chris,” Joe said, “but since you’ve left we’ve missed every break.”
“And last night, we had no idea where to go,” Mika said, meaning I hadn’t been there to steer them around the dinner. “We were lost.”
They were keeping it light, which suggested all was fine with me and this was temporary.
“Well,” I said, “if you want to know just how bored I am in the hospital, you ever wonder who looks at the online feed of the people at the dinner before the dinner actually starts? That was me.”
“That is dark.” Willie laughed.
“You were in a dark, dark place,” Joe said.
I was keeping it light, too, because I could. See, brain working.
Mika, Joe, and I joked later that I really should have drooled and slurred as many words as possible, because that would come to be what people assumed I was like anyway.
chapter twelve
A Head in a Lap
In the midst of this, something else huge was under way in the life of the Lichts. A few days into my hospital stay—I can’t remember when; the days blended—Jenny entered my room in the intensive care unit wearing a smile and waving an ultrasound photo that George Washington’s radiology department had taken that morning.
The photo showed BLT, as we called it.
Baby Licht Two.
A blood test done before my event had revealed Jenny’s new pregnancy, although we had told almost no one. She had been scheduled to have a confirming ultrasound in New York but had to skip it after my brain bleed. GW had been asking if there was anything we needed, anything it could do to make our lives easier, and we eventually said an ultrasound.
Jenny wasn’t sure about this. The chance was remote, but what if the test revealed a baby in distress? How could that be good for her hospitalized husband? But she could tell the test was important to me. I wanted to know she and the baby were healthy, and I needed an uplifting something, a piece of unalloyed good news. On this morning, here it was, a photo of my second child, now eight weeks along, too soon to know the flavor, but here it was.
I’ve always known Jenny is strong. But consider what the ultrasound photo really said. It said that in addition to coping with a spouse whose head was haywire, mulling an offer from CNN made while she was on the train to my bedside, and keeping in touch with our firstborn who had now been whisked to my sister’s in Boston and whom she dearly missed, Jenny was going to have to ride through my crisis while taking care of herself and the new life in her belly. Carlo Angelo Cruz, one of my nurses, called her the “superwoman.”
She wound up as a cop, too.
“She had to field the most incredible succession of people coming in and out of that room,” Mom remembers, “trying to make just the right balance between having him know that people were concerned but not having him completely swamped.”
So many visitors reached Room 284 of the ICU that chairs wound up grouped around my bed like I was a fire pit providing warmth. Mika and Joe came until they had to go back to New York; Mom and Dad came every day; my sister, Stephanie, and my best friend, Marc, came; and NBC types. My senior staff—Alex Korson, Pete Breen, and Ann Edelberg—all came, too. Marc thought, illness or not, I wasn’t really off the