Cameron caught up to him outside ICU, while he was scrubbing up. "We need to talk," she said. Her eyes rested for a moment on the small silver cross he was wearing around his neck, and he knew she was probably wondering where it had come from. It was, in fact, a gift from a recent patient, but if Selvaggio's present caused Cameron a twinge of jealousy, that was karma at work, right?
"There's nothing to talk about," Chase said, his voice crisp with detachment. He felt a hint of self-satisfaction at that, which he knew probably showed—not that he cared; there was no reason to conceal it, and he never wasted energy dissembling when there was nothing to be gained. He entered the ICU and, to his faint annoyance, Cameron followed. "You shouldn't be in here," he told her, and turned his attention to the patient.
"Abdominal pain and vomiting for the last week or so, according to his mother," one of the nurses said, glancing curiously at Cameron. "She wanted him to come in sooner, but he insisted it was nothing serious. Then he started experiencing difficulty breathing. His heartrate's down to 40 bpm..." Chase tuned her out slightly so her could look at the patient himself. The teenager twitching and writhing on the bed was thin, but muscled; his pallid skin shone with sweat, and his lips were ominously blue. Then again, his hair was a shade of black that strongly implied dye, and he was wearing eyeliner, so the blue lips might be down to cosmetics rather than cyanosis.
"Bloodwork?" Chase asked, and the nurse shook her head. "Then start there—check his blood oxygen levels, test for drugs."
"The mother says he doesn't use drugs; she says he works out all the time, and takes his health very seriously," the nurse interrupted, and Chase tried to conceal his impatience. Presumably the mother was the plump, sobbing woman seated next to the boy's bed; she didn't look capable of giving a coherent history, and he very much doubted she knew what her son got up to in his spare time.
"Let's check anyway," he said, forcing a charming smile, but the ICU nurse failed to look particularly charmed; probably she'd dealt with enough professionally condescending charm to last a lifetime. He modified the smile to something more collegial and less overtly flirtatious.
"You've been avoiding me for days," Cameron said, and Chase and the nurse gave her oddly similar exasperated looks. "We need to talk before things get any worse." Her eyes shone with sincerity. Chase wondered how she could fail so completely to understand that, having failed to win the thing he was playing for—her devotion, her undivided loyalty—he had no interest in playing at all. Once a goal was scratched, it held absolutely zero interest for him; how could she not have noticed that?
The boy sat stiffly up in the bed, retching horribly, and vomited. Everyone in the room froze, unable to look away, and the kid's mother started to shriek hysterically. Her hysteria was understandable: her son had spewed a mass of semi-digested bugs. Chase could recognize, without particularly trying or wanting to, several spiders and grasshoppers.
"This?" he said to Cameron, after a moment's silence, "is not a good time to talk." To the nurse he said calmly, "I need that bloodwork to include measurement of his acetyl cholinesterase levels. Add anticoagulant to the drawn samples and get them to the lab as quickly as possible. And send down a sample of his urine to be tested for organophosphates and carbamate." He eyed the mother with unconcealed distaste, but there was nothing for it: she was the best, and easiest, way to find out if the boy had been exposed to pesticides. If the insects he'd been eating had had a bioaccumulation of pesticides, that would explain all his symptoms, and the sooner they could start treatment the better—exposure through ingestion could prove fatal.
He'd spent too long working with House, Chase reflected. There'd been a time when solving the immediate problem of diagnosing and treating the observable symptoms would have been enough; task completed, Chase would have walked away without a second thought. Now, however, he found himself puzzling over the larger picture. Why had this kid been eating insects in the first place? He grimaced as the mother's wails grew louder, but resigned himself to interviewing her anyway.