What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [3]
“I’m having a real problem here,” I said.
Greet Tech said something noncommittal, like “yup.” My father’s words found my lips.
“I do not get headaches, I never get headaches, and I’m having the worst headache of my life. There’s something very wrong with me. And I need to see somebody now.”
Greet Tech came to life. She knew the code, even if I didn’t.
“I believe you are in the right place,” she said.
She wanted identification. There were forms.
Then, I sat.
The reception area was not empty. Decades passed. My hands cradled my head and there arose from me a kind of low moan, an “ahhh,” because I sincerely hurt, and if that drew a little attention, great. It was actually only minutes before they beckoned me to a triage cubicle, where a nurse checked my vitals and found them normal except for blood pressure, which stood at 159 over 107.
They dropped me in a wheelchair and rolled me through double doors and into the heart of the emergency room, to a small examination bay that was all fluorescence and monitoring equipment. I knew such bays. I’d been to ERs as a kid with Dad, sometimes playfully hooked up to EKGs by the nurses.
My bay was curtained into halves, front and back, and each had a bed with wheels and rails. They rolled me to the back, making me the patient in C2B. Patient C2A, a woman, seemed to have fallen during a footrace that morning. I never did get the story. They told me to get undressed, put on one of those haute couture hospital gowns, and put my street clothes in a clear, plastic bag.
Now I remembered that not a soul beyond the confines of the hospital knew where I was.
Dad and Mom had told me to get to an emergency room, but they didn’t know which one I’d chosen. Nobody at Morning Joe even knew I was having a mini-nightmare. Jenny didn’t. Things had unraveled so quickly. It hadn’t even been an hour since the show ended. At 9:59 A.M., I sent a text to Mika Brzezinski at the Marriott Wardman Park hotel, the site of her and Joe’s speech.
In er at gw
Got excruciating and sudden pain in head
Scared—getting cat scan
Will call when I can
I wasn’t scared, really. The word was only meant to get her attention. Joe and Mika needed to know their executive producer was going to be out of touch and the reason wasn’t trivial. But my goal wasn’t to herald a huge personal emergency. Everything in my past said this would be a brief suspension of duty. The EP would be getting out of George Washington.
chapter two
The Little Anchor
There once was a boy with a camera in a house on a sylvan hill in Connecticut.
I was eleven. The camera was a clunky old VCR sort because this was 1983. I set it up in the basement TV room, where I had a desk, and on the desk I put a microphone on a tiny stand.
Each week, I would write a script and put on my tweed sport coat, a dress shirt and a tie, but no dress slacks, because the camera would show me only from the waist up, so underpants were okay. My hair was often an unruly mop, but in every other way I was the mature, authoritative preteen host of The Week in Review, the leading and only show on the WBC television network, which I owned and all of whose viewers were named Licht.
The show was thorough, covering national and international news, local items, sports, obits, weather, and pop culture. Sometimes it featured my sister, Stephanie, who was nearly three years younger and reluctant, or I’d bring in Dad for medical reports and sports commentary. (He was versatile.) If Stephanie screwed up or didn’t take the show seriously, the host could get miffed. At times, I had to bribe her for an appearance or to work the camera, once offering a Velcro Michael Jackson wallet. Mom and Dad still have the show tapes.
Anchor:
For some people, the world is just one big fuzzy thing. Let The Week in Review focus it in for you. (The