What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [29]
Odds were rising my bleed had been freakish. Dr. Deshmukh wanted a third cerebral angiogram in two weeks, but things looked all right at the moment. I had no signs, either, of any secondary impact from the released blood.
Sooner than had seemed possible on day one, I could go home.
The next day, NBC sent a car and driver, and Jenny and I piled into the backseat for the ride up Interstate 95, to New York and Andrew and the restoration of our life, or at least the beginning of the restoration of our life. Some mastery was coming back to me. I felt good, or as good as you can with a headache that was now eight days old.
The hospital gave me do’s and don’ts as we got ready to leave. Don’t drive. Don’t exercise. Don’t do anything that raises blood pressure. Do take the antispasm pills. But nothing was said about how to deal with my emotions. I left George Washington University Hospital never having dealt with a topic certainly worthy of some major consideration.
What had sudden, random, life-threatening illness done to me?
Not to my body. Me.
In the car, I’m pretty sure I put my sad head in Jenny’s lap.
chapter thirteen
An Angry Man
One of Dr. Deshmukh’s instructions was no work.
No chance of that.
Upon arriving at our eighteenth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side on Thursday, May 6, I had an emotional—on my end, anyway—reunion with Andrew, who did not seem fazed his father had been away. MJ takes me out of town quite a bit. Andrew is used to absences, though having both parents away for so long was beyond our norm. If he had not been glad to see me or had been confused as to who I was, that would have been a dagger in my tired heart.
I then retreated to the living-room couch, where I largely stayed for the duration of the mend, mainlining television. To the doorman of our building, to the driver from Washington or anyone else, I must have looked like crap because I felt like it. My head remained hostile, though meds helped. On top of that, my hips hurt. They had been hurting before my event, maybe because of jogging I had been doing, but they hurt even more now.
In the coming days, it was obvious my son and I couldn’t play as we usually did, because I had no gas for extended romps. I wasn’t sleeping well. Moving about was a chore, although that first day at home I did get up to take a shower, my first since the Civil War. At the hospital, they had only sponge-bathed me, so a complete self-rinse was delightful, because I controlled the shampoo, I controlled the soap, and I controlled the duration.
Meals began arriving at our door. Phil Griffin sent lasagna the first night, and while it was heaven to no longer be eating hospital fare, the deliveries were so rich they could not possibly be good for a patient who had been told no exercise. I forced myself.
CNN had told Jenny to take all the time off she wanted to take care of me. She delivered an antispasm pill every two hours, even through the night, which meant she didn’t get steady sleep either, probably not a good thing for BLT. We watched a lot of TV and many movies. I watched MJ a couple of times, only to see little things I would have done differently or not done at all. It was like sitting in the backseat while someone else drives your car. I could do nothing about them from the apartment, so I stopped watching.
More get-well cards came. So did more e-mails from Joe Scarborough. He never called while I was home, and I think I know why. If he had, I might have done what I did with Zucker. I might have faked good health and boundless enthusiasm. He avoided the charade by sending little missives that required only that I enjoy his concern.
How you feeling this morning?
Call if you need anything at all!
Call me if I can help in any way.
The worry of a second event was there, even though the medical chance of one was very small. My brain had been CAT-scanned, MRI’d, and cerebral-angiogrammed so thoroughly that I had much more reason to believe I was aneurysm-free than, for example, you do. Your gray matter has not been repeatedly swept