Welcome to my newest story. I'd very much like to thank my beta-readers Allie and Gail. Without them this story would be even more stupid.
Seeing is Believing (Part 1)
House, M.D.
by Cheers
Saturday, July 7th, 08:22 am
The free clinic at the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital was in full swing as he entered the front doors. The only thing that sucked more than Saturday clinic duty was mandatory Saturday clinic duty. Cuddy said he owed her. No. Correction. She owned him or, more precisely, she owned his ass.
Okay, so the only thing that sucked more than having someone else own your ass was knowing that they did, for whatever the reason, truly own your ass. This Saturday was not going to shape up as one of those memorable weekends he dreamed of in his youth. The two vicodin tabs that he downed in lieu of breakfast weren't going to be enough to placate him for that fact either and he was contemplating taking another one when he heard her telltale heel clips coming up behind him. No one walked with quite the same feminine swagger mixed with self-righteousness as the Medical Director of Princeton-Plainsboro, Dr. Lisa Cuddy.
Rounding to face the owner of his ass for the day, he greeted her with all the human warmth he could muster. "Dr. Cuddy. Fine morning for a little crotch-rot diving, isn't it?"
"You're late." Lisa replied, not even attempting to keep the angry edge off her tone. She had specifically told him that late was not an option on Saturdays. The clinic was busiest on weekends, the days the poor who did manage to hold down jobs had an opportunity to seek medical care without placing their jobs in jeopardy. Even someone as misanthropic as House should recognize something so obvious. Come on! She mentally shook herself. This is House she was thinking about. There was nothing about common human endeavor that mattered less to Gregory House than the mundane nature of simple survival in the lowest classes of American society. Unless, that is, it somehow impacted a case he was interested in. Say what you will about House, he knew and understood and used human nature in ways that seemed more like abracadabra than practicing medicine when it really mattered. But then, that was what made House … well … House. Greg House was perhaps the greatest diagnostician in medicine today. He, for lack of a better metaphor, had made a name for himself – correction, an international name for himself – as the modern day Sherlock Holmes of medical mysteries, complete with drug habit. The only thing he lacked, currently, was a Dr. Watson. Up until six days ago he had had three doctors Watson. Now, sans sidekicks, House was becoming a royal pain in the proverbial you-know-where. And that metaphor only worked if the ass in question was as big as the Garden State itself. House had alienated his subordinates. He had fired one of them and lost the other two to attrition through resignation. Considering that this same House had just barely managed to keep his license after being accused of illegal possession of narcotics, and that Lisa had lied for him only two months ago, and that he had promised to work more hours in the clinic to pay her back for perjuring herself to save him, and for being the world's most obnoxious medical practitioner known to man, he wasn't performing too well this morning. As if she had any right to be surprised. New Jersey may have granted House a license to practice medicine - and failed to rescind that license - but it didn't grant him the right to annoy her more than usual this morning. His glib welcome was pushing her beyond her normal state of annoyance with her least favorite if most famous (and therefore beneficial to the stature of her facility) staff member. He was driving her to new heights of frustration far too early in the day.
"Your shift started", she looked at her watch, "twenty-four minutes ago."
"My watch stopped," House replied almost instantly, turning from that ever-present look of frustration on his boss's face and taking a cursory glance at the stack of charts on the corner of the clinic nurse's desk. It was beginning to look like a five or six pill session in the clinic, and the next required dose was becoming more and more urgent the longer Cuddy glared at him.
Grabbing his left wrist, Lisa noted the perfectly timed tick of the perfectly functioning second hand in his Seiko. "Funny," she said dryly, "it seems to be working now."
"This is my dress watch," he replied, pulling his arm from her grasp. "Thank God I had a spare. I might not have made it at all."
"You can add an extra thirty minutes to the end of your shift to make up for it," she informed him.
"Slave driver," House retorted with mock indignation. "Your heartless rejection of my perfectly plausible explanation for tardiness doesn't go well with your cleavage-revealing outfit. Maybe your breasts are putting too much pressure on that portion of your anatomy." To prove his point, he leaned forward slightly and gazed appreciatively down the front of her blouse.
Without flinching, Cuddy grabbed the top chart from the pile and slapped his chest with it. "Exam room two," she ordered, then turned on her heels and headed for her office. House watched her as she went, amazed at the way her lab coat draped around those same hips that had fascinated him over twenty-five years ago while they were undergraduates.
"Shouldn't that be twenty-four minutes?" He yelled after her.
Without turning around, Lisa replied, "I added on a fine for lying." She grinned slightly and held up her hand to ward off the comment she knew was forming on his lips without even looking. "And if you say one more word I'll start upping the fine by five minutes for every syllable you utter." She thought she heard rather than saw him snap his mouth shut, and that brought on the first full smile of her morning. Getting the upper hand on Greg House was almost as satisfying as sex. Not quite, but almost.
House blew out his breath in frustration and made his way to Exam Room 2. His backpack, slung across his left shoulder so that his right hand could more easily handle his cane, slapped into the door as he entered. He moved across the room in the halting gait that had become as normal for him as breathing since his surgery seven years ago. The surgical removal of the dead muscle that had resulted from the critical misdiagnosis of an infarction causing embolus in his right thigh had changed his life. The cane and chronic pain in his leg had become so much a part of who he was that they practically defined him to the not-so-casual observer. For those closest to him they became just another piece of a puzzle that never quite added up. House was complicated. Unfortunately, the cases he would see today would not be. With a mental sigh, he dropped the pack on the floor in the far corner and turned to the patient sitting on the exam table, a young man of about twenty with a scared expression on his face who was gripping the top of his pants tightly and staring at House's cane.
House moved to the exam stool, sat down, and then hung his cane from the instrument table. "Don't worry," he said as he let go of his cane to let it swing slightly by the handle as gravity forced the tip toward the earth's core, "I only use it on patients who lie to me."
The resultant nervous swallow he got from his first patient of the day told House volumes. He opened the chart and glanced at the clinic nurse's note detailing the patient's main complaint. "So," House said glancing up, "it says in here that you think you have TMJ."
"Ye – yeah," the young man stammered timidly.
"Why do you think that?" House asked, looking at the patient's face and resisting the urge to ask the guy if he even knew what TMJ stood for. There was near perfect symmetry (no one but Halle Berry and Carmen Electra had a perfectly symmetrical face, he mused) and no obvious evidence of temporomandibular joint misalignment or swelling. There was, however, some significant redness in his right conjunctiva.
"It hurts when I chew and my girlfriend told me I had it," he answered.
Rolling forward on his stool, House took his penlight out of the inner pocket of his sport jacket and pulled down the patient's lower lid of first one eye then the other while shining the light at the normal tissue revealed on the left and the inflamed tissue of the right. Satisfied, he ordered "Open your mouth."
The patient did.
"Say AH."
The patient did. The teeth were all aligned well and there was no abnormal wearing pattern. The throat was slightly reddened and the patient's breath had the obvious sweet smell of a recently melted throat lozenge. The throat was only slightly sore but enough to cause the jaw joint pain. He needed only one more piece of information to confirm what he suspected.
"How long has it hurt to pee?" House asked as he rolled the stool back, satisfied with his diagnosis.
His patient remained with his mouth agape and stared at him in open amazement. House waited for a few seconds. Finally, the patient closed his mouth.
"See," House said, "the way this works is I ask a question and then you answer. Once we get that relationship going this exam will move along toward a welcomed end much more quickly."
"How did you know?" the young man inquired, the look of amazement vanishing to be replaced by something that annoyed House almost as much, awed fear.
With a tired nod, House searched the left outer pocket of his coat for the pill bottle. Finding it he pulled it out and popped the cap off with one hand. He tipped a vicodin tablet into his other palm and snapped the cap back on with practiced efficiency. Throwing the pill into his mouth and praying the effect of this latest dose of anti-pest medication worked quickly he motioned toward the man's hands still holding his pants. "The death grip you have on your pants is a giveaway."
The patient looked down at his guilty hands and forced himself to relax his grip, if only slightly. House deposited the pill bottle back into his pocket.
"How long?" House asked, an edge to his voice. "And remember," he added, getting the patient's attention again, "I still have a cane and will use it if necessary."
"A-about three days," the young man said, open fear now apparent in his face.
"You don't have TMJ," House said, as bored as stating the obvious always made him. He pulled his prescription pad out of the right outer pocket of his coat and began writing the first of two prescriptions for a week's course of doxycycline. Ripping the first script free he handed it to the patient. "Give this to your girlfriend."
The young man took the script bewildered and stared at it. "Why are you giving her a prescription?"
"Because, she probably doesn't have TMJ either," House informed as he completed the second identical script and handed it over as well. "However, she does have an infection. The same one you have."
"I have an infection?" the patient asked, stupidly.
House grabbed his cane and saw the patient flinch ever so slightly. "Yep," he said, barely able to hide his amusement. "You both have Chlamydia."
The fear on his patient's face was replaced by a mixture of surprise and shock. Here it comes, House thought, closing his eyes and waiting for the inevitable. "I have an STD?" the man asked as if on cue.
House sighed audibly this time. "I know it sounds completely crazy," House began sarcastically, "two young adults having unprotected sex and all. But yes, you have an STD."
"But you haven't even tested me or her," the patient protested.
"Don't worry," House offered, "I'll have the nice nurse come in and swab your crotch but that won't change the diagnosis. Chlamydia often causes nothing more than pus from the penis but in less common presentations the symptoms are conjunctivitis, the swelling and redness beneath your right eye," House pointed at the patient's face then his throat, "and a sore throat, especially if oral sex was involved. If you had had anal sex you might have had swelling and pain while taking a dump but since you're sitting comfortably I'm assuming there isn't any problem in that general department. True temporomandibular joint disease is uncommon so if your girlfriend's jaw is giving her enough pain to receive a misdiagnosis of TMJ she's probably had her case of Chlamydia for a while now."
House paused for only a brief moment, resigned to having to complete his explanation if any sort of compliance from this guy or his girlfriend were to be anticipated. "If your swab comes back positive, which it will, it's a good bet she gave it to you. The only way to make sure you don't get re-infected is to treat both of you or," House added with obvious skepticism, "suggest to her that abstinence is the best practice until marriage."
The look on his patient's face told him all he needed or wanted to know. "Yeah," House finished, "give her the prescription and tell her to talk to her previous boyfriend." House opened the door of the exam room to leave. "The tree of Chlamydia life is not about to be hewn down by your actions but we might be able to lop off a twig or two."
With that House left the exam room and headed for the nurse's station. He jotted down an order for the STD screening and the scripts he wrote. He didn't bother to add in his note his suspicion about the girlfriend's infection. If any medical professional reviewing the chart couldn't read the obvious signs between the lines they didn't deserve the information. He handed the chart to the nurse who promptly handed him his next case.
"Right" he muttered to himself. What a great weekend this was turning out to be.
He turned toward Exam Room 1. "Next!" he called and walked, leaning almost wearily on his cane, toward his next encounter with mediocrity.