What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [34]
On this first possible day I could return after Deshmukh’s green light, May 24, I was easing back. I wasn’t running the day’s MJ, which was nearly finished by the time I got there. But for days now, my eagerness to rejoin the team had grown as my headache faded, even if I was still secretly fencing with bigger issues.
Jenny didn’t quite understand why I was going back right then. Nobody was pressuring me, or her, so she assumed we would have weeks of family time, at least more than the few we had had. But we hadn’t been doing much. By going back to work, I wasn’t abandoning idyllic days of museum tours and leisurely lunches; I hadn’t been up for things like that. At least by getting off the couch and going back to work I would be productive. I missed Control Room 3A. I wasn’t going back as a heroic statement of awesome dedication to the National Broadcasting Company. Television is what I love. The job was never a labor, and the sooner I went back the greater my morale would be and the healthier I would feel.
Besides, even if I had waited weeks more to return, Jenny knew there was never a chance I was going to quit outright after my illness and turn toward a life of monastic chanting or buy a cozy place above San Diego and tend llamas and support the legalization of marijuana. “He would be miserable,” she says.
That first morning, I sat, not in the executive producer’s chair, but one seat over as Pete Breen, who had been running the show during the past weeks, took the team through the final minutes. During a commercial, they turned on the 3A camera, so Mika and Joe and everybody on the set could see that although Elvis had left the building in April, he was back now, whole and alert.
There was a mountain of mail on my desk. After the show, I started sifting it, enjoying the leisurely routine of it. My BlackBerry had only one appointment, lunch with Phil Griffin. I had been hoping to come back below radar, but word soon spread beyond the MJ family and into the rest of the building, because journalists can never keep any news to themselves.
Of course, everybody wanted to hear the story.
What did it feel like, Chris? Where were you when the pain started? Were you scared? And Jenny was pregnant during this? Biden was involved?
I love telling the story because it is quite a story, and I’m aware that the contrast between what I had been—healthy and young—and what happened to me leads almost everyone to ponder the possibility of random death. I am both a cautionary tale and a lottery winner, and fascinating either way.
Quite a few people treated me as gingerly as a Wedgwood plate. The MJ family knew I hadn’t suffered any neurological tics. But others knew only what the rumor mill had churned up or what Willie had said on the air, and not knowing much about aneurysms, assumed I was now a child to be spoken to slowly and loudly.
“Helllooooo, Chris. How arrrre you?”
Some seemed surprised I was vertical. They had never expected to see me alive and intact again. They would tell me to take it easy, as if without their wise counsel I would be pondering an Iron Man competition. If I was still at the office in midafternoon in those first few days, they would ask why I still was. I began to think they were worried I would start bleeding again right in front of them, and they would be blamed as my face hit the tile in a spectacular dive of death.
Still others thought my intensity was the cause of my near miss. Chris is volcanic, see, and his brain exploded. He paid the price. Be quiet around him.
None of this made me mad, or at least any madder than I already was about what the brain bleed had nearly done. I didn’t say anything to people about their assumptions or their clumsy advice. It wasn’t worth getting upset over. In time, people in the building would see my skills were still there, my decision making sound, and maybe even find out that aneurysms do not grow inside the brain because you happen to be type