What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [30]
But worry about that second event was not a matter of reason. Mika recalls how she hated this period when I seemed to be recovering but when I could be struck down again. “It was not over when it was over,” she says.
A week after I got home, an e-mail arrived as I talked with Phil, who had called to check on the patient. It was from someone at NBC’s human resources department.
Hope this e-mail finds you well and improving, it said. So happy to hear you are home. I just wanted to follow up that we have not received any information regarding your leave and wanted to remind you that you need to call the disability center.
Disability center?
I am disabled?
I am not disabled.
Like aneurysm a couple of weeks earlier, the word was a punch.
The story seemed to be that anyone absent from work more than a certain number of days—and I was coming close—must be classified as “disabled,” which apparently has something to do with which pot of money pays the handicapped employee. Until now, everyone had worked so hard to make my illness as easy to navigate as possible. Now I had to do paperwork? It just felt cold. Bloodless.
I called human resources and asked whether it wouldn’t make more sense for me to skip the whole disability-center thing and use vacation days to cover the ones I had missed and would continue to miss. I’d worked for NBC for fifteen years and had mountains of untouched vacation days, because work routinely kept me from taking them all. But human resources was adamant. My records had to reflect what had happened. If I got sick again and missed many more days, they said, I’d regret not having duly noted the illness in the books and had the proper accounts charged.
I had to be marked disabled.
The paperwork was annoying. The message was worse. For the first time, my illness wasn’t a crisis only within my circle of colleagues and family. It was an NBC thing, a matter of corporate record. Somewhere in some database, a box was being checked.
Disabled: Licht
The always healthy, perpetually energetic, no-setbacks employee was getting a blemish. And aren’t people who are on disability simply gaming the system? Isn’t that what people would think?
A few days later, a thick packet arrived with forms and explanations about COBRA and who was paying my salary, NBC or the state of New York. It might seem implausible, but that packet and all the stuff about disability pushed me through a psychological barrier and into a confrontation at last with the meaning of what I was going through.
Before, in the hospital, I had been in attack formation, participating in the hunt to find the source of my problem and guarding against its side effects. We had immediate goals, such as passing whatever the tests of the day were, and we had a long-range one, getting out of there and going home. Visitors descended daily. Doctors came daily. Meals and medicine were brought. The ICU is a twenty-four-hour place, never closed. I was occupied and diverted.
Upon discharge, this bustle had left my life. Each day now was fairly uneventful. Usually, it was my wife and son and I in the quiet of our apartment, and I had instructions to do nothing but relax as we awaited one more trip to Washington for a third cerebral angiogram, which would either find nothing and I could get more serious about returning to work, or find an aneurysm, which would delay me even more as they repaired it and I recovered.
I had time to think, in other words. That’s what the disability e-mail and the health packet triggered. Thinking. And not of the good kind.
By now, I had more data about the severity of aneurysms than I had in the hospital. One reason was someone named Bret Michaels, an actor, director, and most famously a singer with the heavy-metal band Poison. A few days before my event, he had suffered exactly what I had, a massive headache followed by a diagnosis of subarachnoid hemorrhaging. I had been reading stories about his hospitalization, and there were many, because Michaels is a lot more famous than the executive producer