WILL BUNCH: It’s 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night in the intensive care unit at Bryn Mawr Hospital outside of Philadelphia. The lights are out in the hallway, and it’s relatively quiet — relatively. The one patient who repeatedly screamed out “Help me!” every hour on the hour has been moved upstairs, and now I’m getting used to a nearby patient whose breathing monitor occasionally plays a bizarre jazz riff in the mode of Charlie Parker. My ICU Room 1 is illuminated only by flickering lights, the TV with its endless-50-something-guy loop of Sportscenter, and a pale green monitor showing my heart rhythms, pulse and blood pressure, thanks to a cuff that strangles my left arm when I least expect it, usually as I’m drifting off to sleep. The cuff is just one element of a tangled web of tubes and wires, EKG leads taped to the hairs of my chest, while a pint of fresh blood drips slowly into an IV line, and oxygen meter taped to my left ring finger that glows red and adds a weird ET vibe to the whole affair. There’s also another glow in the room, coming from my laptop computer, where my IV-bruised arms are typing to finish a blog post about Karl Rove and the Delaware Tea Party before I finally doze off. My new book has been on the market for less than three weeks, and if I don’t do something to promote it, it will disappear from the proverbial map, never to return. For one year, I worked my tail off to write what I hoped was the book of a lifetime. Now, amid the strange beeps and flickering lights of the ICU, I wondered if I’d taken that “book of a lifetime” thing a little too seriously. MORE