What I Learned When I Almost Died - Chris Licht [6]
The satisfaction of a diagnosis was tempered almost immediately by the knowledge that migraines are not one-and-done. In time, there’s another, then another, now and forever. How annoying, I thought. I’m now a migraine guy. Who wants membership in this club?
The doctor left. But soon a woman in a black polo shirt came in. The shirt had writing on the back, like TRAUMA TEAM or TRAUMA UNIT, I can’t remember. An entirely different aura surrounded her, one of great urgency. She ran through similar neurological tests. I would soon be a leading American authority on those tests.
“Mr. Licht,” she said, “I’m going to give you a shot for the pain. Then we’re going to take you down and get you a CAT scan.”
I read nothing into it. They were merely being safe about their migraine hypothesis. Anyway, Dad had said to get a scan, so this was good.
What I didn’t know was that the doctor in charge of the morning shift in the emergency room had been told the migraine diagnosis for the patient in C2B and thought my problem might be something else. With any patient in the ER, the supervisor’s job is to consider the worst possibilities, and she was troubled by the swift, devastating onset of my pain. She wanted more tests and had ordered a nurse to my room with pain medication.
Black Polo gave me the shot. Now down the hall I went to get the CAT scan, which took no time at all, and now back I came to C2B. It was nearly 11 A.M.
In the midst of all this, a text had arrived on my BlackBerry.
Shall I call Jenny?
It was Mika. But I was no longer tethered to my phone. I had turned it off and dumped it into the plastic bag with my clothes, a sign of just how awful my head was feeling, because I never put myself out of reach of the known world. Normally, Mr. BlackBerry and I were conjoined twins.
Mika got no reply.
She texted again, a minute later.
I am sending Louis. And telling Joe when he gets offstage. We need to hear from you or we will be there.
Again, silence.
At the Marriott Wardman Park, where Joe was about to start his speech, Mika had not read my initial text as conveying a minor, if somewhat unusual, problem. She has tremendous instincts about situations and people and had gotten a dark feeling from my text, which only got darker when she received no answer to hers. She didn’t tell Joe; he was about to take the stage.
“Louis, I think we have a serious problem.”
Louis Burgdorf, who more or less pummeled me into hiring him after he graduated from college a couple of years ago, is Mika’s and Joe’s personal aide, and he is usually at their side when they make an appearance.
“I’ll stay with Joe,” she told him. “We’ll do the speech. I want you to go to the hospital.”
And now, a ride on the Washington Metro later, he came down a hall of the emergency room as I stood there waiting to use a bathroom. Seeing him was a big comfort. Migraine diagnosis or not, this was no fun.
When we got back to C2B, I climbed aboard my hospital bed and perched there in my goofy gown, which was not what I was wearing when Louis last saw me earlier in the day. He was concerned that there were no nurses, doctors, or technicians, and that I was in such distress and looked so pale.
“My head hurts,” I told him. “You don’t know. I feel like someone’s stabbing me.”
To illustrate, I ran my fingertips from the front of my head to the back.
Now Louis’s phone was getting short Mika bursts.
What is happening?
Have you heard anything?
Where is Chris? Has he seen a doctor?
????
Whether or not I mentioned the migraine diagnosis to Louis, I can’t remember. There’s a lot about that day I can’t remember. But there wasn’t much definitive to tell the outside world in any case. We were still awaiting my CAT-scan results, even if I still thought I had nothing but a migraine. I did ask Louis to call Jenny in New York, because talking to her myself seemed to require far more clarity and concentration than I was likely to have.
Minutes passed. More minutes passed. It seemed as if the hospital had forgotten about C2B. In reality, getting a CAT scan evaluated