Inertia
rainsquall
the iv and
your hospital bed
this was no accident—
—this was a therapeutic chain of events
Their patient this week is a little girl of four, blonde, all quiet smiles and shadowy green eyes, too wide for her pale face. She is playing with Barbie dolls with messy hair and talking aloud to herself when Cameron walks into her room - Molly, she tells her with a shy grin colouring her face, a tiny figure looking even smaller against the standard grey blankets in her hospital bed. A five-year old female presenting with seizures and an unexplainable fever - she seems blissfully unaware of the fact that nobody knows what is wrong with her. Her mother, a stark contrast to her daughter's innocence, looking weary of the world with dull, brassy hair and her face twisted into a worried frown, watches on, her hands clasped together and nervously biting her lip.
Cameron thinks that she isn't so different from all their normal patients, a motley, mismatched collection of people from all walks of life. She smiles sadly at Molly – she grins back - Cameron somehow finds herself liking her. Despite the fact that she hasn't actually said anything to her. It's stupid, a habit she should really break, like biting her nails and setting herself up for those stupid, innocent mistakes she always ends up regretting.
"We're still not sure what's wrong with her. I'm sorry," she says, loose strands of hair from her ponytail hanging in her face. She sighs, shifts her weight from one foot to the other. The mother puts her hands to her face.
"We'll have to keep her here to run some more tests."
The mother blinks tiredly. "When will you know what's wrong with her?"
Cameron sighs. "We don't know. I'm sorry." I sort-of know what this is like, floats through her head, as she watches the mother slump down in her chair, moving her fingers to her mouth as if she is a child, like her daughter in the hospital bed.
Her husband was the same. Yet knowing what was wrong didn't make anything easier - having an irrefutable diagnosis, results of MRIs, cool to the touch, lit up like streetlamps in the night on lightboxes, made it real - made his prognosis so much more inevitable. Having nine months to live, and no hope to soften the blow - Cameron supposes she's lucky that there's hope here.
"See you later," she says to Molly. Molly waves back. Cameron makes a mental note to send Chase or Foreman down next time.
Two days later, their whiteboard is messy with scribbled symptoms, nonsensical, contradictory, no diagnosis to be seen anywhere. They have been sitting around in their various, standard positions around the room for the last three hours - going over and over the test results they've garnered, everything they could possibly need. There's nothing there.
"Maybe—" Chase starts, then breaks off. He sighs in frustration. Cameron offers him a small smile, administering what little comfort she has where it's needed.
Instead of going over her charts and being insulted by House over and over again, she decides to go and do something constructive - or destructive, depending on which way she looked at it.
"I'll be back soon," she says to the team, getting up.
Being hopeful and cynical at the same time is a painful study in contradictions, yet Cameron manages to pull it off flawlessly. During her lunch break, she goes and sits with her, bringing textas and paper, and storybooks with simple, sunny narratives and colourful pictures of fairies with brightly-decorated wings.
"Hi," she greets Molly as brightly as she can, through the doorway.
She stays still. "I remember you," she says, expression curious but guarded. She tips her head to the side, watching Cameron smile tentatively.
"I, uh, brought you some stuff."
She enters almost as if she knows she's doing something wrong, and holds out the plastic bag for Molly to take. She does, and peers in cautiously, slowly taking out the paper and then the textas, letting them scattered around her, resting like feathers around her. And then the book - it almost covers her lap.
Molly's face lights up, and holds the book back out to her. Cameron's head - or it could be her heart, it doesn't really matter - hurts. She takes the book, sits down next to her, and begins to read out loud, and Molly looks on at the illustrations admiringly, running her tiny fingers lightly over the pages.
"They're pretty," she says.
Cameron is not certain whether her normally infallible team will be able to help this girl - and looking at this girl's oblivious smile makes her feel guilty and incompetent and tiny, all at the same time. She continues reading out loud.
The narratives are all simple, saccharine stories featuring mice and little girls and fairies and whatever else, all told in Dr. Cameron's lilting voice. Molly is entranced, then suddenly looks up at Casey.
"Am I going to be better again?" she asks, out of nowhere. Cameron freezes. He mother stares at her, vaguely horrified. She has no idea what to say.
"Yeah. You will."
It's not an easy lie to tell, but Molly and her mother believe it - somehow.
She always says she never means to do this. Watching her seize out of nowhere is frightening, with flailing, tiny limbs and eyes that roll to the back of her head. It makes Cameron feel scared, almost like a child again, calling out wildly for two milligrams of Ativan, stat, and maybe some hope while they're at it.
"It's got to be bacterial," Chase says, more to himself than anyone else, tapping a spoon against the table. Foreman tries to ignore him, instead, flipping through the slightly wrinkled pages of Molly's file for the millionth-or-so time. House tosses his ball at him, narrowly missing his head. "Nothing else could cause a fever this high."
"Really, Chase? I hadn't realised," House shoots back. Chase glares at him, leaning over to retreive the ball which has rolled under his seat.
"Guys, please," Foreman says, irritation creeping into his voice. "Can you leave it for just an hour? In case you've forgotten, we've kind of got a patient here."
"Well, it's not like we can do anything for her," Chase replies, vaguely offended. He sighs. "There's no way we can chase down an infection in time." He rises from his chair. "Maybe the broad-spectrum antibiotics have started to take effect—"
House rolls his eyes. "You mean you actually think there might have been a change after seven hours of waiting?"
The door closes, the sound of Chase's footsteps slowly fading away. Cameron slams her textbook down on the table. Foreman glances over worriedly, thinking that there might actually be tears in her eyes, hidden by her glasses and the shadows under her eyes.
"You okay?" he asks gently.
She looks up, and nods slightly, offering him a wan smile. Foreman isn't convinced.
"I better go tell the mother," she says, by way of excusing herself.
"Masochist," House calls out to her as the door slides shut again.
"There's been no change in Molly's condition," she tells the mother, sitting down next to her on the hard plastic chairs. "Even with the antibiotics we've been giving her."
The mother stays silent, but looks at Cameron with scared, weary eyes. "You mean—"
Cameron looks away, to Molly, who she moves towards, brushing her bangs from her closed eyes. Her skin is strangely warm to touch - something to be expected of a little girl with a 104° temperature.
"There's a good chance. . . that your daughter is going to die. There's nothing more we can do." She pauses. "I'm sorry."
She hates feeling useless, insubstantial. It comes with being a doctor, a lot of the time.
House catches Cameron lingering outside the door, breaths condensing on the sliding glass door she's looking through. The girl who House knows only as 'the patient' is lifeless, pale, painted with sweat. Her life is almost clinging to the IV line like it's all that can save her, the subtly quickened beat of her heart the only motion in a still room.
He taps her on the shoulder. She spins around, visibly deflating when she sees him, House reading 'failure' and 'weary' from the set of her shoulders. She tries to smile – it comes out all wrong.
"So, why are you still here?" he asks, looking through the glass at the patient. "I'm pretty sure you left about half an hour ago to check on her, and don't you have clinic duty or something to do?" He shrugs. "I know I do."
She doesn't answer his question, instead saying, "There's no hope for her, is there."
House the fact that she has phrased it as a statement instead of a question intriguing.
"There isn't."
He's staring at her now, a strange hardness - knowing - in his eyes.
"Stop doing this," he says simply. "You're not a miracle worker, Cameron – just a doctor." He taps his cane against the ground. Cameron looks away.
He's done what he came here to do. He turns and walks away, leaning heavily on the cane. His presence lingers in the air like the scent of chemicals, a constant in the sterile, clean hospital environment. There is the result of lost hope, Cameron thinks, looking up again to watch his loping, uneven steps. Look where he is – short one thigh muscle and maybe some optimism, too, but he's safe – nobody touches him.
For a second – just a second - she envies him.
She dies, four days after being admitted. Cameron hugs the mother and tries not to cry along with her. It's not entirely unexpected, which disappoints her, but she's not about to tell anyone. Instead, she informs her colleagues in an unnaturally quiet voice that Molly died, and the autopsy revealed that they could have saved her - if they had gotten her diagnosis in time. That hurts the most, she thinks, stirring a spoon in her fourth cup of coffee for the morning - watching Chase's discouraged expression, trying to fill out old charts but constantly getting distracted, until he's just frustratedly doodling on the sides of the pages, watching Foreman's slow but constant pacing around the room, almost as if he is looking for a fight - until she realises she's probably been doing it for entirely too long. The silence in the room is overwhelming - where there is usually constant conversation, exchanges laced with sarcasm and sympathy, there is nothing. Her sound of her spoon clinking against her mug as she lets it go causes her to wince.
House holds a whiteboard eraser in his hand, about to wipe the red-markered list of symptoms off the board, leaning heavily on his cane. A ritual for him, of sorts, a life saved - usually. He pauses, and in a rare moment of anger, he throws the eraser at the whiteboard as hard as he can. Two markers fall to the ground with a clatter that reverberates through Cameron's bones and makes her jump. They're probably going to need another whiteboard soon, she thinks but keeps to herself. Her, Chase and Foreman take the hint, and leave.
When the day draws to a close, shadows stretching across the office floors and grasping in vain at the walls, lights wearily flickering on around the hospital, Cameron sits. She's the only one left in the office - an anomaly, because usually, House would still be there - most of the time, with Wilson. House disappeared after she and the other two left the room, though – she assumes she is safe there.
She's reminded of this one time a lot like this, where only a useless wedding ring was left behind, along with a miserable collection of vague and now-dusty memories - now, it's a half-finished picture of a girl with yellow-texta hair and a lopsided smile that the mother remembered to give to her as she is about to walk out the door, sad and all alone.
Taught to cling to hope through darkening days, warm protection against a slow-moving reality, creeping up slowly but surely, Cameron tries not to lose faith. Some would call this denial. She doesn't.
Hope is a dirty, worn blanket Cameron clings to, comforting, but in the end, useless for hiding behind. Material tears and fades with rain and damage, people fade away and die every day – people are left to pick up the pieces, to try clutch onto what remnants of hope they have – nothing she can help.
She stashes the picture away in a drawer where she hopes she won't look in for a long time.
A/N: Lyrics aren't mine – Panic! At The Disco's, rather (shut up shut up shut up). Thanks to Rory for the beta.