Title: Second Word, First Syllable
By: TriplePirouette
Category: Humor
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: They're not mine- I'm a poor and having fun... take pity...
Distribution: my site, anywhere else please ask first :)
Summary: How do you get information from an Aphasic? House has a fun way… Humor. No pairing.
Author's notes: This is what happens when I watch house when I'm tired. And then you add Melissa to the mix. Gah. No ship, sorry. This one's for Melissa, who actually thought this was a good idea. It's my first house fic. Also, I have little to no medical knowledge. My knowledge of Aphasia comes from House and a quick foray into online texts. Any errors are mine.
Feedback PLEASE at: I love anything constructive! Blatant flames, however, will be disregarded and used to roast s'mores...
"This is how you deal with Aphasics?" House closed his eyes and scrunched up his face. It would have been comical if the three doctors around them didn't feel like they were about to either get reamed out or made fun of in front of their patient. "No wonder you guys never got any results with that last one…"
House limped in on his cane from his place at the door to the bedside of their 54-year old male patient. He'd come down with a handful of rare symptoms, including the tongue-twisting aphasia, two days ago. Since then the only thing the team had been able to determine was that he hadn't suffered any trauma.
"Well, you told us to keep him talking!" Chase's outburst was uncharacteristic, but the frustration that underlined his voice was reflective of both his and the patient's exhaustion. Cameron had the good sense to look away, but Foreman's frustration kept him from having any sense, either.
"Seriously, House! We're frustrating ourselves and Mr. Thomas." Foreman circled the bed and put a heavy hand on the whiteboard next to the bed. Words were underlined and circled and crossed out, making it a confusing mess to look at.
"Word Association is useless. He knows what he wants to say, but he's like a code without a key." House taped the patient's head with his finger. "If he knows what he wants to say, but doesn't know why he's not saying it, it's not much help, is he?"
"Huh?" Cameron scrubbed the useless board clean and looked at House as thought he has three heads.
"He's saying that even though he's associating words with different ones, even he doesn't understand the connection. Just because he wants to say 'chair,' he doesn't know why he's actually saying 'book,' hence all this word association crap makes no sense to him." Foreman rubbed his hands over his face, realizing that the last hour had been a complete waste.
"Score one for Foreman. You get a gold star!" House snarked, tapping his cane on the ground.
"Ok, so you want him talking, but he can't talk and asking him is out of the question?" Cameron put her hands on her hips and stared House down.
"How do you talk to someone who can't talk or write?" House limped away from the patient's bedside and towards the center of the room.
"Ok, I'll bite." Chase shook his head to himself and turned to the patient. "Mr. Thomas, do you know sign language?" The patient shook his head. "Ok, that's out of the question. And I'm out of ideas."
"Really?" House looked at them like they were all missing something.
"Ok, Can you just skip wasting our time and tell us what you think we should do?" Forman sat down in the chair next to the bed, crossed his arms, and waited.
"Sure. Why not? It's not like it would be considered 'typical treatment' anyway!" House bugged his eyes and held his left hand out, two fingers out in a peace sign.
When no one said anything, he shook it around in their faces. Cameron mimicked his pose. "Peace?"
House shook his head, held out the fingers again, this time starting with one, adding another, then hitting them against his right forearm.
"You're kidding!" Cameron shook her head and looked between House and the patient.
House shook his head, repeated his previous gesture, waiting for someone to say it.
"You want us to play charades with him?" Forman asked, standing back up. "You want us to play charades with an Aphasic?"
House touched his nose and sat down in the chair in the farthest corner of the room. "Yup. Get going. You guys aren't too quick on the uptake." When no one moved, House sighed. "FINE. I will get the ball rolling. But I'm just the scorekeeper from now on kids. Mr. …. Sir. Sir, no use in writing this down and hiding it from the other players. We need to know where you went when you were supposed to be on a business trip. Don't worry, you're wife's not even in the hospital to hear about your big deception. Ready. Set. Go!"
Cuddy had been on her way to a meeting when she doubled back, stopping in the hallway behind Wilson. He was raptly watching something in one of the patient rooms, which by itself was unremarkable, except that he was also sipping a soda and shouting out random words. It was almost as if he were watching Wheel of Fortune.
"Dr. Wilson?" He jumped a bit when she addressed him, her voice stern over his shoulder.
"Dr. Cuddy." He nodded, and his attention went right back to the room in front of him.
"What's so interesting?" She was pretty sure that they were in the Diagnostics department, not oncology, and that he didn't have any reason to be attending patients in this area.
"House." His eyes didn't move from the room, but she still couldn't quite see what he was looking at. When she moved next to Wilson and peered in, she rolled her eyes.
"Aphasic?"
"Oh yeah." Wilson took a sip through his straw, and Cuddy thought it looked like he was in a theatre. It made her want popcorn to go along with the show. They'd been witness to this a few times over House's career here at the hospital.
"Anything good yet?" She crossed her arms and watched House's fellows as they tried to decipher what the patient was miming.
"Well, the nurse said that they'd been at it for ten minutes before any of them realized they should be using the white board to keep track of things." He pointed at the board, which had an entirely new set of confusing scrawl on it, punctuated by two rows of heavy lines, hangman style. "And Chase was just on the floor crawling around. The patient kept pushing his hand down so Chase just got lower with it."
Cuddy laughed and settled in next to Wilson. "I think my appointment can wait a few minutes."
House twirled his cane, thoroughly amused.
"So you were out of the country!" Cameron announced triumphantly. The patient nodded, thinking they were done.
"Wonderful!" Chase clapped his hands together, happy, until he met Forman's frowning gaze. "We just need to know where, and what the hell you were doing now."
"New puzzle gang! Erase that board!" House pointed at the whiteboard with his cane and smiled sickeningly. "Let round 2 begin!"
Mr. Thomas' face fell, and he rubbed his eyes before holding up seven fingers.
Cameron erased the board, her touch much less vigorous than it had been before. "Seven words…"
House was in his office, bouncing his tennis ball off the wall, when Wilson came in.
"You enjoy that, don't you?" He said as he sat across from his friend.
House continued the rhythm of throw and catch as he talked. "Tossing this against the wall?" He caught the ball and looked at Wilson, his eyes drooping like a disappointed puppy. "And here I thought you knew me!"
"I meant insulting and embarrassing both your fellows and patients by making Aphasics play charades."
House eye's lit up as he went back to tossing his ball. "You know of a better way to get information from Aphasics?"
"No, actually, I don't. It's pretty brilliant."
"And hella fun when Chase is rolling around on the floor trying to figure out how he can get lower than lying down. Chase sucks at charades. Must be the Australian thing… different colloquialisms."
Wilson fiddled with a pen from House's desk, his breathing and heart rate slowing as he listened to the rhythm House made with the ball on the wall. He wouldn't tell anyone that he actually now had a tennis ball hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk for when he needed to clear his head. "So, what was your patient actually doing?"
"You mean when he told his wife he was going to California on business? He was in Thailand smoking local blow with some hookers. Sounds like a great weekend." House rolled his eyes. "Tons of stuff he could have. We're redoing all the blood work and running new tox panels for organics."
Wilson opened his mouth to talk, but his eyes caught movement from the conference room and he turned his head. "And they're doing what?"
Chase was once again on the floor, laying on his back with his arms and legs in the air. Cameron was standing by the whiteboard with a marker gripped in her hand, and Forman was leaning against a book case. Both were very nearly yelling random words at Chase, though the thick glass walls kept him from actually hearing what those words were.
House smirked catching his ball. "Chase needs to report all of his test results via charades for the rest of the week. No talking. He needs to brush up." House watched for a second with evil eyes and a satisfied smirk. "I'm guessing either his sed rate was low, or Chase has dead cockroaches in his apartment."
Wilson laughed. "You enjoy this far too much House."
"I know."