by Chris Licht
She wound up as a cop, too.
“She had to field the most incredible succession of people coming in and out of that room,” Mom remembers, “trying to make just the right balance between having him know that people were concerned but not having him completely swamped.”
So many visitors reached Room 284 of the ICU that chairs wound up grouped around my bed like I was a fire pit providing warmth. Mika and Joe came until they had to go back to New York; Mom and Dad came every day; my sister, Stephanie, and my best friend, Marc, came; and NBC types. My senior staff—Alex Korson, Pete Breen, and Ann Edelberg—all came, too. Marc thought, illness or not, I wasn’t really off the job at all. The job was coming to me. But the laughter was therapeutic, even if laughing made my head hurt even more.
Phil Griffin came with a gift, an iPad stocked with apps to kill time. Dr. Deshmukh came every day to see how I was doing. He didn’t know I’d done a guest stint on the Sunday MJ and wasn’t thrilled when he found out months later. Fairly often, my nurse Carlo helped to keep my muscles in shape by walking with me, first within the room for a few steps, then out in the hall. And one glorious day near the end, one of my other nurses, Elisa Weiss, got permission to take me downstairs in my wheelchair and out the very emergency-room doors I had walked in that first terrible Wednesday. For a couple of minutes, parked outside, Elisa, Jenny, and I basked in the sun and inhaled the smells of spring. It was the first time I had been out of the building, and I felt enormously buoyed, like I might be in the homestretch. Thank you, Elisa.
Both of my families, the one from 30 Rock and the one I spend holidays with, all the people I loved, had come together to help, which filled my painful head with much cheer. Mika introduced herself to my mother as “Chris’s other mommy.” And I could tell Dad was very proud his son knew all these high-flying NBC people. He and Mom watch Morning Joe but they had never come to the set. Mika, Joe, the president of MSNBC, everybody, here to see Chris? Impressive.
Much of the time, though, it was only Jenny and me.
I can’t recall spending as much quality time. It was togetherness, sponsored by crisis. The brain bleed reaffirmed all those reasons we had married but that a workweek can overshadow. We talked about Andrew, who was too young to get on the phone with me, and we took trips down nostalgia highway. “Stupid stuff,” Jenny says. We are Law & Order fans, and watched reruns. The ordinariness was the beauty.
Gradually, thoughts budded about what was going on at MJ. I asked for the BlackBerry. Had to check the ratings. I was feeling better.
No self-pity was shared between Jenny and me. Do not picture a weeping wife slumped across her beloved husband’s hospital bed as the couple laments The Fates that have done this to their happy existence. Even in the dark days after I got home, no wailing about how this was unfair ever passed my lips. To sit passively and bemoan bad luck solves nothing. I deal with the hand that’s been dealt. I don’t waste time wishing for other cards.
Nor did Jenny and I discuss what my illness might mean for our future. Certainly we had no conversations about dying, because neither of us thought I would. Death was a possibility, yes, but only in the way it is when you board an airplane. Instead, most of the time, I wondered where I would wind up on the scale of possible lasting effects. We concentrated on getting out of there and going back to New York and having BLT and getting back to normal. I wanted normal, whatever normal was going to be.
One day at the hospital, Jenny’s cell phone rang. The screen said UNKNOWN NUMBER.
“Hello?”
“Jenny?”
“Yes?”
“Joe Biden.”
Just like that. No secretary intervening. Him.
“Oh. Hello, Mr. Vice President.”
Cell-phone reception in the ICU was chronically bad, and now Jenny was terrified of losing the call, because how do you call back “unknown number”? The signal at the moment was good. She froze in place and listened because, as you might have heard, Joe Biden is a great talker.
He told her I was going to be fine. The doctor was great. The hospital was great. And, of course, he was living proof I would be great. He had survived what I had. Yes, the not knowing and the waiting were difficult, he said, but don’t worry.
Thankfully, he didn’t do what many well-wishers did, which was adopt a commiserating persona and say ever-so-sincerely that my situation was oh-so-terrible and oh-my-God how you doing? Instead, Biden made us feel the bind we were in was nothing, a blip.
Another day, Jeff Zucker showed up. He was the boss of all my bosses, the president and CEO of NBC Universal. Quickly, I morphed from hospital patient to loyal and hardworking employee. Mika and Joe’s blitz on my behalf might have started to ease my fears about work, but this visit still required major game face. Zucker’s The Guy.
Can’t wait to get back, I told him, which wasn’t true. I could wait, quite a bit longer. I added it was so annoying that the TV in my hospital room didn’t carry MSNBC so I could watch my show and not miss an important thing. In other words: Jeff, I am practically not sick and the network is absolutely uppermost in my mind, not this pool of blood coating my brain.
Zucker read this for what it was: nonsense.
We’ve all heard people say nothing is more important than health. But when they say that, it’s more reflex than belief, and they often secretly think you’re malingering.
Zucker is different. Years ago, he had come close to dying from colon cancer. He had made the journey I was now making. He knew no job matters all that much, work is only what you do. He knew physical well-being is the prime directive.
He leaned in.
“Nothing is more important,” he said. “Don’t worry about anything. We’ve got it covered. We’ve got you covered.”
Okay, I said.
He apparently didn’t think he’d gotten through.
“Chris.”
Pause.
“There’s nothing more important.”
He is a wise man. He helped me let go—let go of work—even more than I had.
The worst day, other than the first, was the Friday two days later. As Jenny sat with me, I tried to say something. What came out was a kind of linguistic Cobb salad. Everything was there, but all tossed. “Bed, outside, window.” Something like that.
Jenny could tell by my face that I knew my words were gibberish but she could also tell I couldn’t self-correct. Did this herald a re-bleeding? Was this the anticipated spasm in advance of a stroke? Is this the descent?
I had had a bad night. Since the first day, nurses had been coming every hour or two and leading me through those familiar neurological tests designed to catch brain deterioration as early as possible, so the hospital could swing into action. Shrug your shoulders. Stick out your tongue. Close your eyes as tight as you can. I always passed.
“Who is the president of the United States?” a nurse said during one visit.
“You know,” I said, joking, “we really don’t know because we haven’t seen his birth certificate.”
Ha.
The tests did not cease at night, so my sleep was broken and battered, and on this Friday morning I had been surly. They had given me a drug and it had knocked me out, until I awoke speaking in tongues to Jenny.
She went in search of a nurse who quickly determined the villain was the drug, not my brain. But most of the time in the ICU, thoughts of a re-bleed or sudden dysfunction hovered over the bed. Any minute I expected my vision would blur or my tongue would mangle a word. Why else would they be testing me constantly? I had had no warning in the back of the Escalade that morning. It seemed reasonable I’d get no warning the second time.
A re-bleed was not the only open question either.
Would there be brain surgery?
If an aneurysm was found during the coming second cerebral angiogram, my head would probably be opened up, though I didn’t know that was Dr. Deshmukh’s likely remedy. I only knew what he had said, that he’d go in and get it. Dad, however,
knew brain surgery was a real possibility and he was worried, not because George Washington didn’t know what it was doing, but because brain surgery is inherently delicate.
But at least it’s definitive. Aneurysm found, aneurysm remedied. Case closed. Go in peace, my son.
Not finding one, though, would leave an eternal mystery. Why had I bled? It would be like a game of Clue in which no murder suspect was ever found in any room with any weapon. Dad actually preferred this scenario, though, because he did not want a surgical expeditionary force walking around in my head.
On Wednesday, May 5, one week to the day after I had arrived in the emergency room, I was again wheeled to the cerebral angiogram suite. Once again they cut into my leg, ran the catheter, shot the dye, scanned the scans.
Once again, no aneurysm.
Odds were rising my bleed had been freakish. Dr. Deshmukh wanted a third cerebral angiogram in two weeks, but things looked all right at the moment. I had no signs, either, of any secondary impact from the released blood.
Sooner than had seemed possible on day one, I could go home.
The next day, NBC sent a car and driver, and Jenny and I piled into the backseat for the ride up Interstate 95, to New York and Andrew and the restoration of our life, or at least the beginning of the restoration of our life. Some mastery was coming back to me. I felt good, or as good as you can with a headache that was now eight days old.
The hospital gave me do’s and don’ts as we got ready to leave. Don’t drive. Don’t exercise. Don’t do anything that raises blood pressure. Do take the antispasm pills. But nothing was said about how to deal with my emotions. I left George Washington University Hospital never having dealt with a topic certainly worthy of some major consideration.
What had sudden, random, life-threatening illness done to me?
Not to my body. Me.
In the car, I’m pretty sure I put my sad head in Jenny’s lap.
chapter thirteen
An Angry Man
One of Dr. Deshmukh’s instructions was no work.
No chance of that.
Upon arriving at our eighteenth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side on Thursday, May 6, I had an emotional—on my end, anyway—reunion with Andrew, who did not seem fazed his father had been away. MJ takes me out of town quite a bit. Andrew is used to absences, though having both parents away for so long was beyond our norm. If he had not been glad to see me or had been confused as to who I was, that would have been a dagger in my tired heart.
I then retreated to the living-room couch, where I largely stayed for the duration of the mend, mainlining television. To the doorman of our building, to the driver from Washington or anyone else, I must have looked like crap because I felt like it. My head remained hostile, though meds helped. On top of that, my hips hurt. They had been hurting before my event, maybe because of jogging I had been doing, but they hurt even more now.
In the coming days, it was obvious my son and I couldn’t play as we usually did, because I had no gas for extended romps. I wasn’t sleeping well. Moving about was a chore, although that first day at home I did get up to take a shower, my first since the Civil War. At the hospital, they had only sponge-bathed me, so a complete self-rinse was delightful, because I controlled the shampoo, I controlled the soap, and I controlled the duration.
Meals began arriving at our door. Phil Griffin sent lasagna the first night, and while it was heaven to no longer be eating hospital fare, the deliveries were so rich they could not possibly be good for a patient who had been told no exercise. I forced myself.
CNN had told Jenny to take all the time off she wanted to take care of me. She delivered an antispasm pill every two hours, even through the night, which meant she didn’t get steady sleep either, probably not a good thing for BLT. We watched a lot of TV and many movies. I watched MJ a couple of times, only to see little things I would have done differently or not done at all. It was like sitting in the backseat while someone else drives your car. I could do nothing about them from the apartment, so I stopped watching.
More get-well cards came. So did more e-mails from Joe Scarborough. He never called while I was home, and I think I know why. If he had, I might have done what I did with Zucker. I might have faked good health and boundless enthusiasm. He avoided the charade by sending little missives that required only that I enjoy his concern.
How you feeling this morning?
Call if you need anything at all!
Call me if I can help in any way.
The worry of a second event was there, even though the medical chance of one was very small. My brain had been CAT-scanned, MRI’d, and cerebral-angiogrammed so thoroughly that I had much more reason to believe I was aneurysm-free than, for example, you do. Your gray matter has not been repeatedly swept electronically for possible mines.
But worry about that second event was not a matter of reason. Mika recalls how she hated this period when I seemed to be recovering but when I could be struck down again. “It was not over when it was over,” she says.
A week after I got home, an e-mail arrived as I talked with Phil, who had called to check on the patient. It was from someone at NBC’s human resources department.
Hope this e-mail finds you well and improving, it said. So happy to hear you are home. I just wanted to follow up that we have not received any information regarding your leave and wanted to remind you that you need to call the disability center.
Disability center?
I am disabled?
I am not disabled.
Like aneurysm a couple of weeks earlier, the word was a punch.
The story seemed to be that anyone absent from work more than a certain number of days—and I was coming close—must be classified as “disabled,” which apparently has something to do with which pot of money pays the handicapped employee. Until now, everyone had worked so hard to make my illness as easy to navigate as possible. Now I had to do paperwork? It just felt cold. Bloodless.
I called human resources and asked whether it wouldn’t make more sense for me to skip the whole disability-center thing and use vacation days to cover the ones I had missed and would continue to miss. I’d worked for NBC for fifteen years and had mountains of untouched vacation days, because work routinely kept me from taking them all. But human resources was adamant. My records had to reflect what had happened. If I got sick again and missed many more days, they said, I’d regret not having duly noted the illness in the books and had the proper accounts charged.
I had to be marked disabled.
The paperwork was annoying. The message was worse. For the first time, my illness wasn’t a crisis only within my circle of colleagues and family. It was an NBC thing, a matter of corporate record. Somewhere in some database, a box was being checked.
Disabled: Licht
The always healthy, perpetually energetic, no-setbacks employee was getting a blemish. And aren’t people who are on disability simply gaming the system? Isn’t that what people would think?
A few days later, a thick packet arrived with forms and explanations about COBRA and who was paying my salary, NBC or the state of New York. It might seem implausible, but that packet and all the stuff about disability pushed me through a psychological barrier and into a confrontation at last with the meaning of what I was going through.
Before, in the hospital, I had been in attack formation, participating in the hunt to find the source of my problem and guarding against its side effects. We had immediate goals, such as passing whatever the tests of the day were, and we had a long-range one, getting out of there and going home. Visitors descended daily. Doctors came daily. Meals and medicine were brought. The ICU is a twenty-four-hour place, never closed. I was occupied and diverted.
Upon discharge, this bustle had left my life. Each day now was fairly uneventful. Usually, it was my wife and son and I in the quiet of our apartment, and I had instructions to do nothing but relax as we awaited one more trip to Washington for a third cerebral angiogram,
which would either find nothing and I could get more serious about returning to work, or find an aneurysm, which would delay me even more as they repaired it and I recovered.
I had time to think, in other words. That’s what the disability e-mail and the health packet triggered. Thinking. And not of the good kind.
By now, I had more data about the severity of aneurysms than I had in the hospital. One reason was someone named Bret Michaels, an actor, director, and most famously a singer with the heavy-metal band Poison. A few days before my event, he had suffered exactly what I had, a massive headache followed by a diagnosis of subarachnoid hemorrhaging. I had been reading stories about his hospitalization, and there were many, because Michaels is a lot more famous than the executive producer of MJ.
Sprawled on the couch or lying in bed during these days, I began to get upset at the mysterious thing in my head that was now rendering me the disabled guy on an NBC form. I went over and over the past couple of weeks. Dad had warned that after getting home, I might get depressed. This wasn’t that. This was anger. I tried to calm myself by saying it could have been a lot worse. After all, I had only wound up with headaches, not handicaps.
That cheery tack did no good. It had the opposite effect.
Wait. This could have been a lot worse. This fucking thing could have taken me out.
I got madder still at my head’s defection from its normal state. For me, anger is not something to be endured passively, but to act upon. Its cause must be confronted. Blame must be apportioned. There must be an outcome.
Who or what was responsible for my near-death experience?
Where can I unload this anger, so I can feel better?
I had been told aneurysms more or less happen. If you smoke or use drugs, your risk is greater, or if you have high blood pressure, or if several people in your family have had one. But none of that applied to me.
Did I become sick, then, because of my lifestyle choices, like living in New York or enjoying a glass of wine with dinner? Was my home next to a landfill or beneath utility lines and my body had been poisoned or zapped, leading to a bulging artery? Did I consume massively caloric meals? Drive fast cars? Indulge in cocaine?