“What did it feel like?”
That’s usually the first question I get when someone finds out I survived a brain hemorrhage. The answer is easy: the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Like someone was tightening a vice around my head. The kind of pain where you immediately know something is very wrong with you. In other words, don’t freak out the next time you get a bad headache. In my experience, a bleed on the brain announces itself in such a way that you will know it’s time to get to the hospital.
Then, inevitably, there’s the follow-up question asking how a near-death experience changed me. That one is harder to encapsulate in a casual conversation. “Oh, you know, live every day like it’s your last,” I’ll say. But, of course, the answer goes much deeper. I am, fundamentally, a different person.
At the time of “the incident,” as I like to call it, I was the executive producer of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. By definition, EP jobs are adrenaline-fueled, all-consuming, 24/7 thrill rides. I loved it. Three hours of live TV every morning, evening events with the biggest names in media and politics, travel at a moment’s notice—it was all very exciting, and very much dominated my time—leaving little of me left for my wife and young son. If I’m being honest, my job and its trappings defined who I was much more than being a dad and husband. And if I am really being honest, that didn’t altogether bother me.
But then, my brain sprung a leak and I found myself lying in the ICU with a lot of time to do nothing but think. In the very beginning, I remember thinking how I wanted everything to go back to normal as quickly as possible. I wanted to be back in the control room, back at the parties, back in the game. But that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. And as I would learn, my life would never go back to “normal.”
It turns out that a near-death experience is an efficient way to de-clutter your brain, a way to simply push out things that don’t matter. Emotional spring cleaning, if you will. I realized that anything I wasn’t worried about at that moment. I probably didn’t need to worry about ever again.
My wife, Jenny, had been simply amazing from the moment she found out I was in the hospital. Holding my hand through the painful procedures, managing visitors, reassuring me I was going to be okay. When I got home she not only had to take care of me (setting an alarm to give me an anti-seizure pill every two hours and dealing with my overall crankiness) but she also had to be mom to our 2-year-old son. Oh, and did I mention she was pregnant?
It was somewhere during that time when something clicked—I didn’t want to miss a moment with her or my kids. This brain hemorrhage had almost robbed me of that.
Now, you may think I’m going to tell you the Licht family packed up and moved to Vermont to sell cheese and open a bed and breakfast. Sorry. The thing is: I also love my job. It’s part of who I am. That de-cluttering of my brain has actually made me better at what I do. But I don’t let work define me any more. When I’m home with my family, I am there. I turned off the vibrate on my device and told work to call if it was urgent. I take my vacation time. And remember those evening events I used to love so much? Before I RSVP, I ask myself, is this worth missing a night with my family?
I also resolved to just do more. A football game with my dad that isn’t completely convenient, a quick trip with my wife, things like that. And this philosophy has spilled over to how we spend time as a family.
So while I don’t recommend having a brain hemorrhage, I can say, given how it brought me closer to my family, that it turned out to be one of my life’s greatest blessings.
Chris Licht is the executive producer of “CBS This Morning” and the author of What I Learned When I Almost Died: How a Maniac TV Producer Put Down His BlackBerry and Started to Live His Life. To learn more about Chris and his book, visit chrislicht.com.
