David Talbot - Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of My Stroke

O n the evening of Friday, November 17, 2017, I began suffering a stroke while drinking and dining with friends at a restaurant in my longtime hometown, San Francisco. I write began because I was stricken by a stuttering stroke, which took the next forty-eight hours to splutter to its conclusion. The strokes onset was initially alarming, but soon became sufficiently clandestine for the first twenty hours or so to escape my concern. The initial odd feelinga sort of darkening of my headlightspassed, and I shrugged it off, blaming one glass of wine too many. By the time the stroke had finished its damage, however, I found myself in the intensive care unit of a city hospital, with a small part of my brain dead from asphyxiation, and various mind and body functions severely disabled.

Lying in the hospital that would be my home for the next five weeks, my brain felt swirling and strangely muted at the same time. I was seeing double. The entire right side of my bodyfrom the crown of my head to the toes on my footwas partially paralyzed, and the limbs on that side of my body felt like dead weight. I couldnt get out of bed without nursing help. The left side of my face drooped and my speech was labored and barely understandable. My throat muscles were damaged and I could swallow only ice chipsone at a time, and with the greatest concentration, as nurses and loved ones nervously monitored me to make sure I didnt choke on or aspirate the bits of frozen water. I couldnt piss on my own and I had to be catheterized every few hours.

I was a fucking mess. And yet, I felt mysteriously elated. I was still aliveand I was still cognitively and physically intact enough for hospital authorities to decide after a two-day observation period that I passed their Darwinian survival test. This meant I could be transferred to the first-rate stroke ward at the Davies Campus of California Pacific Medical Center and begin to rebuild my life.

But my elation came not just from my medical good fortune, such as it was. I felt like I was being given another chance, not just to rebuild my life, but to restart it.

Before my stroke, at age sixty-six, I felt both encumbered and frantic. I had spent the past ten years or so shuttling back and forth to Hollywood, working with madcap directors and a revolving crew of producers and writers, in an endlessly vain effort to turn my history books into movies or TV series. I was driven by my familys chronic financial needs and by a desire, deep in my Hollywood bloodline, to see my work translated to the screen. My books The Devils Chessboard and Brothers are dark explorations of the fraught relationship between American democracy and the national security state, including the shadowy labyrinth of the Kennedy assassinations. Creative types in Hollywood found the books deeply alluring, yet terrifying to work on. The controversial projects inevitably attracted political intrigue and corporate back stories that I could barely fathom.

Stuck in the Hollywood morass and nearing the end of my career, I felt doubly mired. As a journalist and author and active participant in the historic convulsions of my times, I had experienced and accomplished most of what I wanted to in lifeat least those things that were within my power. My wife, Camille, and I had nearly finished raising our two sons, Joe and Nat, and we had enjoyed and endured the mad ride of creating a family and holding on to it for dear life. For the first time in my memory, I felt that I was just kind of waiting around, that my heretofore hectic, overflowing life was coming to an end. And then it did.

As I sprawled in my hospital bed, feeling permanently dazed, I tried to describe what the experience felt like to my wife and sons through my slurred, labored speech. It felt, I said, like a cross between a brutal barroom beating and a spiritual awakening. Ive spent my life rooted nearly exclusively in the joys and toils of the material world. At those times that I have felt transported to a higher realm, it has not been on the wings of angels. Instead Id been soaring on love, music or a heady feeling that Im part of some grand human movement to change the world. A more enlightened version of my generations sex, drugs and rock n roll mantra. But my stroke left me feeling exalted, in a way that Id never felt before.

I felt more alive, and yet more in touch with death, than I
had for a long time, maybe ever. I suppose I felt that I had died
because part of my brain literally hadand Id come back to life. It was like I was one of those mysterious middle-aged men you hear about now and thenmen saddled with debts, overwork and family burdens who suddenly vanish into thin air, shedding the skin of their old lives and starting life anew somewhere as a different person.

At some point during my extended stay in the hospital, I began to realize that I liked this new me more than the old version. For one thing, he was physically braver. I used to be so phobic about intrusive medical procedures that I refused to have my blood drawn during visits to my doctor, to my great embarrassment. But after my stroke, I became so used to having needles jammed in my arms that Id chat pleasantly with the lab technicians as they poked around looking for a promising vein. As nurses hovered over my groin with catheter tubes, wrestling to thread them expertly through my urethra, around the prostate gland and all the way to my bladdera procedure that requires a miraculous amount of dexterityI interviewed them about their lives in my journalistic style or listened to their stroke ward gossip.

Thats another thing about this new person who was mehe was somehow more patient and attentive to others. Every person who came into my hospital roomneurologists, nurses, physical and occupational therapists, dietitians, psychology interns, religious counselors, stroke ward volunteers with comfort dogs for patients to pet, acupuncturistsseemed fascinating to me. Each of them was alive in the world, with a unique story to tell. Being a patient has taught me patience and empathy, and since my patient and outpatient care lasted for many months, I had time to absorb the lessons of my infirmity.