What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [33]
Mike had a point. People had been wonderful during my crisis. I hadn’t expected it. And I had been lucky, indeed. Our walk in the park, coming during my days of silent anger about nearly dying and having no one to punish, made me think there was, after all, some good here, the love of other people, not the least of them Mike.
Three days or so after the walk, I met Joe for brunch, the first time I had seen him since Washington. E-mail had been an okay way for us to stay in touch if the topic was my health, but not if it was work. If I passed my third cerebral angiogram in a few days, I would be on a glide path back, and that meant I needed to know in depth what had been happening at 30 Rock and what he was thinking.
As we ate at a restaurant in New York called P.J. Clarke’s, Joe mentioned that Mika had scolded him for using only e-mails and not phone calls to stay in touch with me at home.
No, I said, your e-mails were perfect.
Throughout, he and Mika had shown so much concern, making me feel so much better. There was no more appropriate moment to tell him, even if such a naked expression of gratitude might make a very private man uncomfortable.
No matter what happens, I told Joe, even if we have fights, even if my contract is not renewed and I leave MJ for some reason, “I will never forget what you did for me.”
I got teary.
“I will never forget,” I said again.
He suggested I shouldn’t have been so surprised.
“Of course I love you,” he said.
Which I now knew beyond doubt.
On Friday, May 21, still feeling angry but perhaps not quite as much after talking with Mike and Joe, I took the train to Washington, looking to put a period at the end of a sentence. Jenny came, too, of course. I could have had this third angiogram done by someone in New York, but I trusted Dr. Deshmukh and the hospital, and no other institution could possibly have treated us as well.
Once again, I was taken to the angiogram suite and a catheter went into my leg and all the way through me, and the peering at monitors began. Once again, Jenny waited.
She was very nervous. If an aneurysm was found, after having eluded Dr. Deshmukh for more than three weeks, I would be devastated, she feared, demoralized. It wouldn’t mean death or an inability to speak or anything like that, but it would mean more doctors and tests, more invasion of me in an effort to eliminate the now-found aneurysm, more hospital time, perhaps days of recovery, pushing normalcy further away.
But if my arteries were clean for a third time, all the statistics suggested my brain would not rear up again, that my event had been a rogue. It might have been merely a vein that leaked, not an artery. Being under less pressure, veins are less troublesome if they bleed. Or it might have been an aneurysm so very tiny it was simply not visible, that it had bled and sealed itself completely and was not a candidate for future bleeding.
The test finished. Dr. Deshmukh looked at me.
My brain was fine. No more tests were necessary. No more cutting into my leg. No more doctors.
Go to work if you wish, Dr. Deshmukh said.
I wished.
“You can consider this event behind you,” he said.
Well, in a physical sense I could.
chapter fifteen
Back
Twenty-six days after my brain popped, I walked down the stairs of a subway entrance near my apartment and joined the Monday-morning crush on a southbound train, emerging a few minutes later at Rockefeller Center.
I don’t usually ride the subway to 30 Rock, not because I shun the masses, but because Morning Joe begins so early NBC sends a car to make sure I get there. Coming out of the subway flooded me with sensations I hadn’t felt in a month. Thousands of workers pounded toward their offices, sidestepping one another on the sidewalks, buzzing on phones, noshing bagels, lining the low marble walls of the plazas on Sixth Avenue to read for a few minutes with their coffees.
The