What I Learned When I Almost Died by Chris Licht

Author:Chris Licht
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 9781451627688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-05-01T10:00:00+00:00

chapter ten

A Kiss

I was an exhausted lab rat as evening came.

Poked and drugged, scanned by huge machines. A catheter had taken a cruise through my torso, my brain had been squirted with dyes, and I hadn’t eaten since before dawn, when I got up to do MJ.

The hospital brought food of some sort, maybe soup and crackers, and I know I drank a lot of ginger ale, but nothing could overcome the sensation of having gone a thousand rounds with a battalion of heavyweights. The head pounding had entered its ninth hour. The emotional tank was on empty.

Yet I didn’t feel I could give in to fatigue. My brain couldn’t be trusted, which was a sorry thing to say about it after we had spent so many happy years together. If I shut it down for sleep, it might not restart. No one had said that; I just believed it.

I don’t remember which doctor it was, but in the past few hours one had tried to buck me up by saying a good percentage of folks with a ruptured aneurysm—if that’s what I had—go on to lead pretty normal lives.

A good percentage? That’s it? “Good” sounded like “not too many.”

My spirit did not soar.

For the first time, including Andrew’s birth, thoughts of work were not racing through my head. I didn’t care about it, which was liberating, but there wasn’t much choice. My brain could not handle anything other than its own dysfunction. There was no room to ponder what guests had been booked for tomorrow or what hot topics we might pursue. Mentally, I had to surrender as executive producer of Morning Joe.

Besides, Mika and Joe at some point had said they would not be doing MJ tomorrow. They’d leave the hosting duties to Willie Geist because they were too upset. At the time, I really didn’t believe they would skip it. But they did. In retrospect, this became part of my education. Wow, they didn’t do a show because of me? They were that concerned? The file of evidence that perhaps I worried too much was thickening.

At 5:45 P.M. on that first day, Dr. Deshmukh entered my ICU room, adding to the standing-room-only gathering. Joe, Mika, Louis, Jenny, me. The doctor was going to give a status report, and Jenny remembers he exuded calm competence. As he spoke, the reporter in Mika scribbled on the backs of two sheets of paper apparently provided by Louis, because one was a printout of one of his e-mails and the other was a copy of Joe and Mika’s schedule for that day. She gave me those notes as a souvenir.

Exactly twelve hours earlier, at 5:45 A.M., we had been fifteen minutes from airtime. Who knew when I’d get to do another show.

Dr. Deshmukh began by saying the arteries within my brain looked fine. None of the scans—and I’d had three by now—had found the characteristic signs of an aneurysm.

“That,” he said, “doesn’t make me feel any better.”

There was no doubt I had a subarachnoid hemorrhage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.