What I Learned When I Almost Died

by Chris Licht

  I tried to talk her out of this. Why, I said, do women always think ahead to the worst case? We are not about to get married. It’s dating, not betrothal. Why not see what happens? If something does, we’ll figure out what to do.

  One night, on a rooftop deck of a friend’s apartment in New York, I expounded like this for forty-five minutes, trying to break her resistance and winding up nowhere. Ever since I was a teen, I have known what my wife would be like, someone smart, beautiful, warm, independent, and successful. And dark-haired, which Jenny is. Nobody before had met every item on my list. She did. I wasn’t ready to declare her The One, but neither was I ready to give up merely because of a hurdle like being in the NBC family together.

  In the end, oddly, it was precisely because we worked for the same company that the walls came down. Both of us were dispatched to Athens in the summer of 2004 as part of NBC’s coverage of the Olympics, and out of the shared pressure, fatigue, frustration, and exhilaration of covering a monumental event emerged a seriously hooked couple. A few weeks later, I brought Jenny to my sister Stephanie’s wedding. I saw how easily and warmly she blended with my family. (My family was always my strongest dating asset because Mom and Dad have been together since high school, suggesting long commitment runs in the genes.) And Dad was completely smitten with my date.

  In most relationships, the sides begin as exemplars of polite, reasonable behavior and only later do the shields drop and the irritating flaws materialize. But Jenny and I never went through the poseur phase. Our relationship started badly; she disliked me long before she liked. And at the Olympics, I had seen every Jenny there was. Tired Jenny. Crying Jenny. Tough Jenny. Neither of us was going to be surprised by the other because we already knew each other so well.

  Months of bicoastal dating unfolded. We never went more than two without seeing each other. Once, when Jenny was sick in New York and I was in San Francisco, I called ten restaurants in Manhattan trying to find one that would deliver chicken soup to her apartment as a surprise. (I found one; they added a brownie, too.)

  Jenny was the first person who made me think of someone other than myself. Before she came into my life, I was only about me and my work. All you had to do was check out my wardrobe. I had NBC hats, NBC T-shirts, NBC jackets, NBC backpacks. And I wore that stuff constantly. But Jenny quickly came to mean so much to me that I pledged I would never do anything to mess up the relationship I had finally convinced her to have. “I’ll never break up with you,” I told her. “It will never come from me.”

  Every decision I made was geared to keeping her and making sure she kept me. Jenny will tell you that from the moment we reconnected years after California, I was a model of thoughtfulness, which folks at 30 Rock will consider headline news. One time, before we became a serious couple, I was invited to an out-of-town wedding and asked Jenny if she would like to join me. When she said yes, I made sure our hotel room had two beds. With anybody else, I would not have thought of being as gentlemanly. Even killer producers can be softened.

  Our two-city relationship could never work for long, of course, because there were too many sad airport farewells. The only choice was to do something I had never done, which was put the personal ahead of the professional by moving to New York. I did not care what job I landed as long as it was with NBC and I was with Jenny.

  Having been at big local news stations, I assumed my résumé would induce salivation in New York, but nobody at the network seemed impressed, nor did anyone at the local station, WNBC. So one day, I sat down with an executive for the little-sister cable network, MSNBC, which at that time was based not at 30 Rock but in Secaucus, just across the Hudson River.

  The MSNBC executive had no job either. Maybe later. I was being escorted out of his office when I blurted out that I’d like to talk with Phil Griffin, who was then the cable network’s vice president of prime time. We had known each other at the Today show, where he was a producer and I a college intern, so Phil agreed to talk to the supplicant. But he only half listened. I was getting nowhere. He launched into an autopilot seminar about how cable news is more opinionated than broadcast. I didn’t mention that I found cable news unwatchable. Finally, Phil asked why I was moving back east.

  “I’m dating Jenny Blanco,” I said.

  “You’re dating Jenny Blanco! Oh my God! I love her! I hated that she left!”

  Jenny, remember, had worked for MSNBC before switching to the New York local station. Phil regarded her as a smart, serious, levelheaded goddess. If she was dating me, I must be a superior being. “I trust her judgment any day,” Phil says now. Immediately his enthusiasm for my application rose, doors opened, and before long I had an offer to be a senior producer of an MSNBC show called Scarborough Country. I had never seen it. I had no idea who Joe Scarborough was.

  It was difficult, taking this new job. The only news I had ever done was broadcast and local, and I was a big deal in that familiar world. I was nothing in cable news and my new job was a lesser one, compared to what I had done. But it would be in New York, hub of all things media. And the move wasn’t about me, it was about us, Jenny and me, and I had promised to do whatever it took to preserve us.

  A week after arriving to start with Scarborough Country, I proposed to her during a previously planned trip to Acapulco. A year later, at a hotel overlooking the Pacific Ocean just north of San Diego, where Jenny had grown up, 150 people watched our marriage begin.

  At the rehearsal dinner the night before, my sister made a speech she had carefully typed. Stephanie began by saying that most of her life, her older brother could be pretty focused on himself, demanding, driven, sharing few feelings, willing to be unpopular to get what he wanted. Then, she said, I met Jenny. Remember that scene in Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise tells Renée Zellweger, “You complete me”? Well, that’s what Stephanie said Jenny does for me.

  She’s even made me a better dresser. I’m not nearly the sartorial commercial for NBC I used to be. My relationship with her kind of sums me up. You might not like me when we first meet, but you’ll warm up after a while. If I hadn’t met her, if we hadn’t clicked, I don’t know how I would have gotten through what was happening to me in George Washington Hospital.

  chapter nine

  A Jacket

  As Jenny entered my ICU room, the only thing I could blurt out, for the second time that day, was an observation of magnificent dumbness. It came nowhere close to conveying my joy.

  “You’re here,” I said. “You came.”

  Jenny had spent the previous few moments in a bathroom outside my room, lecturing herself about how important it was not to add to my fears by dissolving in front of me. Jenny is a crier. But the woman who now came to my bed was neither distraught nor frightened as she took my hand, but radiant and calm.

  “I love you,” she said.

  To her I looked, considering the brain bleed, not too bad. This was an odd thing about my event. I never looked sick. I was probably the least sick-looking patient in the ICU. No bruises, cuts, punctures, rashes, spots. No limbs in casts. I wasn’t weak. My breathing was fine and my heart chugging along. The malfunction was out of sight, visible only with exquisitely calibrated technology, and manifesting itself, so far, only as a horrible headache.

  Before entering, Jenny had imagined her husband might be unconscious or unable to talk. She could tell by my eyes, though, I was still operating in the here and now. We said very little to each other, because the usual first questions between spouses already had answers. How was your day? A personal worst. And yours? Same.

  Ever since Louis reached her as she was feeding Andrew in his high chair that morning, she had been in motion from our apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Penn Station in Midtown and then down the East Coast via Amtrak. She had been in perpetual communication with my parents, Mika, my sister, her father, and our babysitter, who took control of Andrew as Jenny departed.

  She hadn’t tried to call me. If I was in the hospital, where I had never
been, I was too bad off to disturb. Someone had said “aneurysm” to her in the flurry of calls, and brain bleeding, but Jenny had no more knowledge of the medical technicalities and risks than I or any layman did. But she knew it must be bad, because she knew my parents were now bound for Washington and “they are not dramatic or overreactors.”

  On the train, Jenny did not fast-forward to a world in which I had died. Get there. That was all. Work the problem. Because she had no idea what she would find at the other end, her three or four hours of travel were beyond anxious, even weird. As the train passed through New Jersey and Philadelphia and into Maryland, folks at CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 reached her. She had been working for CNN part-time but had been discussing a full-time job with them. Now, on this day of all days, they offered it, having no clue where she was going or why. She was apologetic. Could this be discussed later?

  Louis reached Phil Griffin at 30 Rock, where he is now president of MSNBC. Phil went online to search “aneurysm” and the more he read, the worse he felt. He knew how much I loved being at the center of Morning Joe. It seemed quite possible that some sort of disability would end my career.

  My sister, Stephanie, reached Marc Nespoli. My best friend—I was the best man at his wedding, he at mine—grew up to be a psychiatrist, and after he heard from Stephanie, his thoughts reverted to something that had happened during his medical training at a Vermont hospital. One of his patients, a nineteen-year-old man who was being treated for seizures, suddenly summoned nurses to his room in the middle of the night because he had “the worst headache” of his life. He died of a subarachnoid hemorrhage a short time later. In other words, unlike me, Marc knew firsthand the threat posed by a ruptured aneurysm. He, too, felt a need to get to Washington quickly.

  Mike Barnicle, who had been with us on Morning Joe that morning, was at his hotel when he was called. Mike marvels at the intensity gap between newspapers, where he grew up professionally, and television, where he now lives. At his old paper, the Boston Globe, you wrote a story or column for the next day, which was stressful for a few hours, but there was no prompt verdict on the quality of your words. Circulation data didn’t arrive the next day, and even when it did, it did not offer a measurement of the worth of your story specifically, only the paper’s value as a whole.

  At MJ, new ratings arrive every afternoon on my BlackBerry and up and down the corridors of 30 Rock, measuring the popularity not merely of the show, but of each eight- or ten-minute segment. Who watched at that moment? How long did they watch? Happiness or failure, Mike says, “comes right down the hallway, like an ocean wave.” He wonders how any of us handle it. Among his first thoughts now was that my brain had shorted out from the crazy intensity of network television.

  It was my parents who had known about my emergency the longest, because I had called them first after my brain popped. After my call, my father the doctor and my mother the physician’s associate had gone about their day in Connecticut, not terribly worried because there was no evidence yet they should be. But then Jenny telephoned, then Mika, then Joe, and with each call things got worse. Dad and Mom decided they had to get to my bedside. Then, as they prepared to go, Joe called again.

  “I just spoke with the neurosurgeon, Dr. Deshmukh,” Joe said, “and he says the situation is very serious and you should come down immediately.”

  Dad couldn’t believe the phrasing Joe had used. Was he saying what it sounded like?

  To Dad, you would never tell a relative on the phone that a loved one is dying. What if that relative was at the wheel of a car at that moment? What if she was in the kitchen, fainted, and hit her head on the counter?

  No, you would euphemize until you could tell the relative face-to-face and provide comfort and assistance. You would keep it vague on the phone, not saying death was imminent, but saying only that things were serious. As Joe just had.

  Was he deliberately resorting to this sort of compassionate haze to avoid saying I was dying? Or had he inadvertently chosen a wording not realizing how a doctor might interpret it? For a moment—perhaps the worst of his life, he said later—Dad saw a void opening beneath his feet. He might not be able to handle what seemed to be happening, the death of his son.

  “Hold it,” he said to Joe. “You have just seen Chris. Is there any difference whatsoever in how he is from the time he went into the hospital to the time you last saw him?”

  Joe would have to be specific now. Either I could still talk coherently, as I could when I had called Dad a few hours before and he had sent me to the hospital, or I could not, because the aneurysm had begun to wreck my brain, which would mean we were headed for something catastrophic.

  “Oh, yeah, he’s fine,” Joe said.

  He did not mean fine as in healthy. He meant nothing had changed since my symptoms had first erupted. I was stable. Dad saw the void close. But he knew the situation remained grave, even if it was not deteriorating. I might be headed for brain surgery. The doctor in him knew too much about the risk of opening a skull and venturing inside with instruments. Surgery might repair the aneurysm, but collateral damage was always possible. Would I have all my functions when I left the operating room?

  At least for now, I was neurologically all right and safely in a hospital, a big one, full of neurosurgeons who could react if my brain seemed to worsen. “It’s sort of like in a poker game,” Dad says, “and everything you own is on the table. That’s the bad news. The good news is, you have a pretty good hand.”

  Looking back, being a pile of chips is sort of how I felt.

  Now Dad, a man who deals in facts and eschews drama, did something uncharacteristic, practically superstitious. As he and Mom frantically packed to make the train that would take them to Washington, he became obsessed with finding a certain lightweight, outdoor jacket of his. It had been a gift from me, brought from the Vancouver Olympics two months earlier. He had worn it to work that morning and now felt he had to take it with him. It was a link to his son, who was in danger.

  He couldn’t find it. He looked everywhere. He and Mom even drove back to their medical office to look. Not there either. They had to leave without it.

  Except they didn’t, because the jacket was in Dad’s suitcase, where he himself had put it, an act that stress and uncertainty had promptly obliterated from his memory.

  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. And the blood had to have come from somewhere. It wasn’t fiction.

  “I am still very nervous about you,” he said. “I am concerned you have an aneurysm that’s not detected. In a week, it may show up. If and when we find it, we go in and get it.”

  Sometimes, it can even take three cerebral angiograms to locate the weak point in the arterial system. Clearly, I would be at George Washington for a while. If nothing were found during a second angio, Dr. Deshmukh said, maybe I could go home in two weeks.

  Two weeks.

  Lots of patients are hospitalized for their ailments far longer, but two weeks seemed an eternity to someone who had never been in a hospital. My headaches would last even longer, Dr. Deshmukh said, until the runaway blood was absorbed back into my system.