"No."
The first rule of being a doctor is that you give your patients what they need, not what they want. Nobody wants high-dose steroids, or a spinal tap, or fifteen months of physical therapy, but that's what they're going to get.
"No."
House doesn't like the kindly doctor stereotype, to say the least- old Doc Johnson, all white lab coat and kindly face and dead patients because he can't bring himself to offend his friends. House doesn't have any friends, they say, and he certainly doesn't have any friends who are patients. There's a reason for that.
"No."
House has Wilson, who rolls his eyes and lets Greg drink his beer when they go out. He has Cuddy, who matches him eye to eye and sneer for sneer, but who lets him do his job. He has his three little ducklings.
"No."
House has his patients. They're not people- rather, they're file folders heavy with lab printouts and radiographic film, shedding handscrawled notes and paper clips on the table in the lunchroom. The patients are puzzles, something to gnaw away at when he's playing Metroid or loitering in the clinic's break room. Patients are letters and lines and numbers that he scrawls on the whiteboard, and he doesn't need to talk to them, or see them, to fix them.
"No."
House doesn't need to see his patients, and when he wanders up to their rooms and stares in, half-hidden by the blinds as he thinks, some prideful part of him rebels. He lasts only a few minutes each time, fiddling with his cane, before thumping on his way, and it takes ten minutes or one good snide remark before he feels like himself again.
"No."
House gives his patients what they need, not what they want, because patients as a rule always want what's worst for them- the soft way out, the easy answer, the gentle word. He won't do that crap. But he'll give them what they need, and that gives them their lives. Everything else is negotiable. Everything.
"No."
So when Cameron stands in the hallway and asks him for something- something he'd like to give, something it would be so easy to say, something that curls in his glass of whiskey at night, that haunts him like a pleasant ghost in the halls-
"No."
It's not what she wants, but it's what she needs.
"No."
And if Gregory House ever looks at what he wants, or needs, and how best to treat himself, it will only happen in his darkest, safest places, where he can close his eyes and feel pity for his patients, and his friends, and himself.