What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [27]
Phil Griffin came with a gift, an iPad stocked with apps to kill time. Dr. Deshmukh came every day to see how I was doing. He didn’t know I’d done a guest stint on the Sunday MJ and wasn’t thrilled when he found out months later. Fairly often, my nurse Carlo helped to keep my muscles in shape by walking with me, first within the room for a few steps, then out in the hall. And one glorious day near the end, one of my other nurses, Elisa Weiss, got permission to take me downstairs in my wheelchair and out the very emergency-room doors I had walked in that first terrible Wednesday. For a couple of minutes, parked outside, Elisa, Jenny, and I basked in the sun and inhaled the smells of spring. It was the first time I had been out of the building, and I felt enormously buoyed, like I might be in the homestretch. Thank you, Elisa.
Both of my families, the one from 30 Rock and the one I spend holidays with, all the people I loved, had come together to help, which filled my painful head with much cheer. Mika introduced herself to my mother as “Chris’s other mommy.” And I could tell Dad was very proud his son knew all these high-flying NBC people. He and Mom watch Morning Joe but they had never come to the set. Mika, Joe, the president of MSNBC, everybody, here to see Chris? Impressive.
Much of the time, though, it was only Jenny and me.
I can’t recall spending as much quality time. It was togetherness, sponsored by crisis. The brain bleed reaffirmed all those reasons we had married but that a workweek can overshadow. We talked about Andrew, who was too young to get on the phone with me, and we took trips down nostalgia highway. “Stupid stuff,” Jenny says. We are Law & Order fans, and watched reruns. The ordinariness was the beauty.
Gradually, thoughts budded about what was going on at MJ. I asked for the BlackBerry. Had to check the ratings. I was feeling better.
No self-pity was shared between Jenny and me. Do not picture a weeping wife slumped across her beloved husband’s hospital bed as the couple laments The Fates that have done this to their happy existence. Even in the dark days after I got home, no wailing about how this was unfair ever passed my lips. To sit passively and bemoan bad luck solves nothing. I deal with the hand that’s been dealt. I don’t waste time wishing for other cards.
Nor did Jenny and I discuss what my illness might mean for our future. Certainly we had no conversations about dying, because neither of us thought I would. Death was a possibility, yes, but only in the way it is when you board an airplane. Instead, most of the time, I wondered where I would wind up on the scale of possible lasting effects. We concentrated on getting out of there and going back to New York and having BLT and getting back to normal. I wanted normal, whatever normal was going to be.
One day at the hospital, Jenny’s cell phone rang. The screen said UNKNOWN NUMBER.
“Hello?”
“Jenny?”
“Yes?”
“Joe Biden.”
Just like that. No secretary intervening. Him.
“Oh. Hello, Mr. Vice President.”
Cell-phone reception in the ICU was chronically bad, and now Jenny was terrified of losing the call, because how do you call back “unknown number”? The signal at the moment was good. She froze in place and listened because, as you might have heard, Joe Biden is a great talker.
He told her I was going to be fine. The doctor was great. The hospital was great. And, of course, he was living proof I would be great. He had survived what I had. Yes, the not knowing and the waiting were difficult, he said, but don’t worry.
Thankfully, he didn’t do what many well-wishers did, which was adopt a commiserating persona and say ever-so-sincerely that my situation was oh-so-terrible and oh-my-God how you doing? Instead, Biden made us feel the bind we were in was nothing, a blip.
Another day, Jeff Zucker showed up. He was the boss of all my bosses, the president and CEO of NBC Universal. Quickly, I morphed from hospital patient to loyal