by Chris Licht
He did not go into detail about what “go in and get it” meant, but there are two common ways. One involves an interior journey very much like the cerebral angiogram. A catheter is pushed through the patient’s arteries, this time all the way to the scene of the crime. A coil of wire—thinner than a strand of hair—is pushed through the catheter and jammed into the balloon of the aneurysm. That fills it and seals it off from the artery, eliminating the weak spot through which blood has escaped.
Sometimes, though, the balloon is so tiny no coil can fit inside. Or sometimes its neck is so wide any coil shoved inside will fall back out, dropping into the main bloodstream, where it could lead to a stroke. In those cases, the second type of fix is used: brain surgery.
Dr. Deshmukh felt I was a candidate for number two, but he kept that to himself. He hadn’t found an aneurysm, which probably meant mine was really, really small and coiling would probably not be possible. Instead, when he found the microscopic assailant, he would go in through the skull and pinch off the aneurysm with a titanium clip. It’s not as awful or dangerous as it sounds, he says. Surgery is more invasive than going the interior route, yes, but getting rid of aneurysms this way has been done for half a century.
If I had known brain surgery was in my future, however, I wouldn’t have felt better that it had been done for half a century.
Dr. Deshmukh could not close off the aneurysm by either means, of course, if he could not find it. For now, he was calling a halt to the hunt. He does not like to do cerebral angiograms one after another in a constant quest for the aneurysm. For one thing, the procedure itself has risk. And in the immediate aftermath of a rupture, the body can camouflage the scene, and it can take several days for things to settle and the aneurysm become easier to see. Because he hadn’t seen mine after the first angio, there was a chance it was being obscured in just this way. It made little sense to search again so soon. He would do a second cerebral angiogram a week from today.
Until then, we had to be alert for any neurological sign that the aneurysm, wherever it was, was rupturing a second time. The odds of that were not great and they diminished each day, but the threat was real. He did not say this either, but Dr. Deshmukh has had patients who survive the initial rupture, are safely ensconced in the intensive care unit, and then suffer new bleeding and die before they can get to surgery.
In other words, patients who were in precisely my situation.
My ignorance was my happiness.
But maybe it wasn’t an aneurysm, the doctor went on. In about 15 percent of cases, no definitive reason for the bleeding is found. It’s a mysterious one-off event, unlikely to happen again. But he still had an obligation to keep hunting.
Even if there was no aneurysm and I never re-bled, there was one last serious matter.
The blood already there.
Until it was absorbed, it was an irritant. I heard that a lot. An irritant. Apparently, the renegade blood could irritate me into a stroke by causing my healthy arteries to spasm, and the most likely time frame for that was between five and ten days from now. I was to start taking a pill every two hours, nimodipine, whose purpose was to prevent arterial spasms.
Dr. Deshmukh recalls that at some point during his briefing, I asked whether I would be able to go back to work. “This is a guy who’s accustomed to go, go, go, four in the morning to whatever late hours in the day,” he says. I didn’t seem concerned I might never be able to do my job again, he says. It was more that my schedule had blown up. He knows the type. “They want to go back to work right away, and they don’t like being in the hospital and they don’t like taking time off.”
No, we don’t.
So that’s where things stood. Possible re-bleeds? Possible spasms? I was in more precarious shape than I had thought.
And the day wasn’t done.
Though I finally felt ready to succumb to sleep, I had to endure one more test.
Sometimes, the culprit in cases like mine is a tumor in the brain or on the spinal cord that ruptures and releases blood, mimicking the symptoms of a ruptured aneurysm. Dr. Deshmukh didn’t think that’s what had happened to me, but he wanted to rule it out. The test is a long one involving an MRI, and most patients hate it.
I hated it.
They held off this test until Mom and Dad arrived, well into the night now, coming directly from the train station, where they had been picked up by an NBC car. Willie Geist, who had not been with us on the trip to Washington, had come from New York on the same train, and remembers thinking as he walked in how vulnerable I looked, hooked to monitors, pale, whipped. It was so not me, he thought.
Agreed.
I thought I saw tears in Mom’s eyes. Dad, knowing how much I like to control things, knew that being in this whole mess would drive me crazy. He was about to be so right.
I was wheeled away to another suite, put on another hard-surface slab, and once again slid into a machine. This one clicked relentlessly, loudly. I was not medicated this time because the test was not invasive. I was much more aware than during the cerebral angiogram.
As I lay there for twenty minutes, thirty, listening to the clicking, silently objecting to my lack of command over anything in my life right now, the whole day rose up and punched me. There was no good to any of this. Everything sucked. The brain bleed, the tests, the fatigue, the disruption, the inability to find the thing in my head. All sucked. Why I thought there should be some good in all this, I don’t know, but I found none. The thoughts were precursors of much bigger, darker ones that would descend upon me in a week. I lay there silently in the MRI machine with nothing to do but indulge my irritation.
Why does the slab have to be so hard? Who fucking designed this thing to be that hard? We can put someone on the moon and this machine has to be so loud I can’t even hear myself think? And, honestly, how long does it take to do a map of my brain?
Then I was silent no longer.
“Enough!” I yelled. “Done!”
When I got back from the MRI, Mom and Dad and Jenny were still in my room. It was late now. My parents would spend the night at a hotel NBC had found for them and would pay for. Jenny would have to leave soon, too; hospital rules. As my parents began to go, Dad stopped and returned to my bed. He bent close to my ear, and whispered.
“I absolutely fucking guarantee you that you will be all right,” he said.
He didn’t know if I had heard this, because I seemed so tired and beaten up. But I remember his vow now. It gave me hope. Dad never lies. Dad never coddles. If he was promising I was going to be all right, then I was going to be all right.
He leaned close and kissed me.
chapter eleven
The Caller
Though I long ago gave up, quite willingly, the ambition of being an anchor or reporter, I was often on the air during a typical MJ. In Control Room 3A at 30 Rock, there’s always a small camera focused on my chair in the front row because I sometimes banter with Joe and Mika during a show, usually about e-mails viewers have sent while we’re live. They have become used to seeing the young executive producer in his dress shirt with no tie, sleeves rolled up, headset clamped over short, wavy hair.
My absence would be noticeable as time rolled on. And on the first day after my event, it would be really noticeable that Mika and Joe weren’t there. So from NBC’s famed Washington bureau, Willie Geist explained to those at home what was going on.
“Our friend Chris Licht was admitted to a Washington hospital yesterday after experiencing extreme head pain,” Willie said. “A subsequent CAT scan led doctors to believe Chris had suffered an aneurysm.”
Since childhood, I have enjoyed the thrill and excitement of covering news, but never had I been the news being covered. My brain bleed was inverting the natural order.
“Chris is in stable condition,” Willie went on, “and suffered no neurological effects from the incident. We expect him to make a full recovery. We do ask that you please keep Chris in your prayers.”
; I am not religious, and in the past my reaction upon hearing that someone was praying for someone else was entirely cynical. Good for you, terrific. Now people were going to pray for me. Jenny’s aunt, a nun in Boston, even made sure my name was included among those for whom her congregation was to pray at Mass. All this felt rather good, surprisingly. I liked the idea that spiritual thoughts were traveling through the cosmos on my behalf. Whatever might work to get me out of this, I was in favor of.
I didn’t see or hear Willie read his statement because the television in my ICU room offered many channels but MSNBC was not one of them, a source of frustration during my entire stay. Nor, therefore, did I see him chat on the air a few minutes later with Mike Allen, the chief political writer of the Web site Politico, who had mentioned my brain bleed in his column that day, a column read by the same people who watch MJ, namely, the entire political universe.
But not long after all this discussion on the air, it became clear somebody must have said something about me, because my BlackBerry lit up with e-mails. Jenny now had possession of it as a precaution against my worst tendencies, and she began reading aloud the things that were flooding in. E-mails from people at NBC I hardly knew. People at NBC I’d had disagreements with. Civilians who were fans of the show, maybe had seen my face.
Thinking of you.
Get well.
It was merely the beginning. In time, Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball on MSNBC, would send a note saying, Aren’t you the guy who created that morning show that’s got all the buzz? Let me know if you want my movie collection—or to come visit and love you close up. Doris Wood of Surprise, Arizona, said she really missed seeing me on the air. Linda Tatum of Fort Riley, Kansas, said I needed to hurry back because Joe, Mika, and Willie “need experience to balance them out (smile).” Bonnie McGregor of Menlo Park, California, wanted the show to keep giving updates about my condition because I do such a good job with the production values, she said. And Brian Williams, the anchor of the NBC Evening News, sent a letter saying my event had sent a chill through 30 Rock because so many admired me.
This was overwhelming, especially the reaction from colleagues. I didn’t know about all this admiration Brian mentioned. I assumed my fan base was limited. After all, a killer producer, as he goes about his killing, inflicts casualties. If the show matters above all else, as it did to me, hurting someone’s feelings by being tough or brusque is an inevitable result.
I was aware enough of my reputation to have set out to be nicer and send fewer nasty e-mails, and I was making progress. But the affection and concern now floating into my hospital room electronically was a revelation, one that penetrated to my core. Any place has its feuds, and MSNBC can have ideological ones because some shows lean left and Joe Scarborough is more conservative. But the e-mails said, in effect, that nobody was focused on that. People were thinking of Chris the guy, the one in the hospital bed, not Chris the producer. I was so touched by this that in the aftermath of my illness, if I know you and I find out you’re sick, you’ll get a note from me. Never did that before. Getting good wishes when you’re in a tough spot means a lot. Trust me.
What happened next, however, was quite ridiculous.
I began to think I wasn’t sick enough.
These notes are very nice. They reflect genuine concern. And yet, other than a really bad headache and intravenous tubes, I feel fine. I feel like me. Doctors have gone in and found nothing other than the blood. This could amount to nothing but a freak, minor thing. Am I really worthy of the attention in these e-mails? Am I going to seem like the boy who cried wolf? Will people feel burned if I turn out to be fine and they got all worked up for nothing?
At this point, remember, I didn’t know the full risk I faced because I didn’t know all the statistics, the ones suggesting that the number of people in my situation who emerge whole is only a very fortunate minority. If I had known that, I might not have been anxious about whether I warranted these e-mails and letters.
But I was anxious now.
Now came a complementary thought.
If all these people were sending all these e-mails, they must think I’m in terrible shape. They must think I’m a vegetable. If you announce, as Willie had, that someone is expected to make a full recovery, that’s crap, isn’t it? That’s another way of saying that for now, as we speak, the poor guy is not doing too well at all.
In the corridors of the national media, which were the ones I cared about, they would assume I was done, no longer young, no longer energetic, no longer a killer. Although made with the best of intent, Willie’s statement suggested that the master and commander of Morning Joe was now fragile.
I couldn’t be seen that way. In my job, everybody looks to bully and take advantage. If you’re a pushover, you get run over. And that’s what people would think. As I lay there in the hospital, I might well have stopped caring about the particulars of the next MJ, but I still cared about my professional standing, even with a brain bleed. My education-through-illness wasn’t far enough along yet for me to not care what people thought.
Three days later, on May 2, Mika and Joe did a special Sunday edition of the show from the lawn of the White House. We had long planned this, because the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was going to take place the night before and it would be fun to rehash the jokes and the celebrity sightings and President Obama’s remarks.
That dinner is one of my favorites, and it was depressing to miss it, but Jenny and I had at least watched on C-SPAN. But without MSNBC available in my room, I couldn’t see the special MJ the next morning. So we called NBC from my hospital room, and Jenny and I listened on speakerphone to a live feed of the show on a call-in line.
Someone told Joe I was parked there, eavesdropping.
He decided this caller had to be heard.
I hadn’t prepared for this. But right away, I liked the idea. Joe seemed to sense I would be worried about my image. If he put me on the air, if only by phone, people out there would hear my voice, hear my thoughts, and realize I was still me. Even better, my health was improving already. They had done another CAT scan because my head really hurt, and it had shown the blood was being reabsorbed faster than expected.
Sitting in director’s chairs with the White House behind them, Mika and Joe looked as if they had partied way too much at the dinner. They wore sunglasses. But they and Willie were chipper as they cued up the caller from the hospital. They began by noting that Alec Baldwin had asked about me at the dinner the previous night.
“How are you feeling right now, Chris,” Joe said, “and how are they treating you at GW?”
For a nanosecond, I stammered slightly, then got going.
“I feel a lot better. Really turned the corner yesterday, and they couldn’t be treating me any better, which is largely because Mika got on the phone and you got on the phone, and they’ve just been amazing here.”
My voice was finding its stride.
“A lot of outpouring, which has really helped, and I will say I don’t think the ICU has seen anything like you two last night before the dinner.”
Mika and Joe had shown the television audience photos of themselves in their formalwear visiting my room, Mika draped across my bed and leaning in to give a kiss. My face was cherry with embarrassment.
“I know this will shock you, Chris,” Joe said, “but since you’ve left we’ve missed every break.”
“And last night, we had no idea where to go,” Mika said, meaning I hadn’t been there to steer them around the dinner. “We were lost.”
They were keeping it light, which suggested all was fine with me and this was temporary.
“Well,” I said, “if you want to know just how bored I am in the hospital, you ever wonder who looks at the online feed of the people at the dinner before the dinner actually starts? That was me.”
“That is dark.” Willie laughed.
“You were in a dark, dark place,” Joe said.
I was keeping i
t light, too, because I could. See, brain working.
Mika, Joe, and I joked later that I really should have drooled and slurred as many words as possible, because that would come to be what people assumed I was like anyway.
chapter twelve
A Head in a Lap
In the midst of this, something else huge was under way in the life of the Lichts. A few days into my hospital stay—I can’t remember when; the days blended—Jenny entered my room in the intensive care unit wearing a smile and waving an ultrasound photo that George Washington’s radiology department had taken that morning.
The photo showed BLT, as we called it.
Baby Licht Two.
A blood test done before my event had revealed Jenny’s new pregnancy, although we had told almost no one. She had been scheduled to have a confirming ultrasound in New York but had to skip it after my brain bleed. GW had been asking if there was anything we needed, anything it could do to make our lives easier, and we eventually said an ultrasound.
Jenny wasn’t sure about this. The chance was remote, but what if the test revealed a baby in distress? How could that be good for her hospitalized husband? But she could tell the test was important to me. I wanted to know she and the baby were healthy, and I needed an uplifting something, a piece of unalloyed good news. On this morning, here it was, a photo of my second child, now eight weeks along, too soon to know the flavor, but here it was.
I’ve always known Jenny is strong. But consider what the ultrasound photo really said. It said that in addition to coping with a spouse whose head was haywire, mulling an offer from CNN made while she was on the train to my bedside, and keeping in touch with our firstborn who had now been whisked to my sister’s in Boston and whom she dearly missed, Jenny was going to have to ride through my crisis while taking care of herself and the new life in her belly. Carlo Angelo Cruz, one of my nurses, called her the “superwoman.”