Boys Are Back In Town chapter 2
In the MRI machine, Wilson was nervously twiddling with anything within his reach. Actually, he wasn't nervous. I gotta put on a good show for House. Make him think I am really worried.
Cuddy, in one of her crazier moments, had decided to listen to the Radiology department head when he submitted his budget asking for money to upgrade the MRI suite. Many thousands of dollars were wasted on painting the walls and adding homey little touches meant to make patients less nervous. Never mind the fact that patients in an MRI usually could care less about the decor inside the room. Kissing ass was something Cuddy did for a living. House could never figure out why she was constantly begging benefactors for donations; given the fact that PPTH was a for-profit healthcare institution, there should have been enough profit for services provided that begging for donations should not have been necessary. Had PPTH been a not-for-profit charity hospital, of course private donations would have been an important financial resource. As it was, House knew that PPTH was doing well financially, and should not have had to rely on private donations so much.
Even though she obviously liked kissing ass, she also had a good business acumen, and she knew a smart business move when she saw one coming. Even in Cuddy's mind, decorating the MRI suite would have been considered an enormous waste of money. House wondered why she would do something so crazy. He figured she must be sleeping with that particular department head. Either that or she'd had a particularly good night with the benefactor who donated the money for the project. The Lucas Douglas Memorial MRI Suite. House snickered at that thought.
For whatever reason, Cuddy decided to approve the crazy expense. Suddenly, the MRI suite was painted mauve, expensive artwork was hung on one wall, and a gizmo was installed on the MRI that would project pictures of birds, butterflies, or some other supposedly calming scenes on the other walls. There are open MRIs and closed MRIs. PPTH had an MRI suite consisting of two rooms. One was an open MRI and one was a closed MRI. In the open MRI, yeah, patients could see the walls, but people getting a really important medical test usually didn't care about that stuff anyway. In the closed MRI, it was useless to decorate anything since patients stuck in the machine could not see anything beyond the inside of the machine. The MRI manufacturer made virtual reality goggles that the patients could wear inside the closed MRI, allowing them to see different scenery, but nobody ever wanted to wear the things because they were usually too worried about the test to care about anything else.
Each of the two MRI rooms in the suite had been similarly redecorated and upgraded.
The visual and auditory effects gizmos in each room were pretty much useless to everyone else except a maverick doctor who just wanted to play with the equipment and screw with the patient stuck in the machine.
With House behind the controls, suddenly the room was filled with the sounds of birds chirping and scenes of a sunny beach with seagulls flying overhead and pooping on the poor sucker laying underneath in the MRI. They were in the closed MRI room and Wilson couldn't see any of it, but he could hear House snickering over the open microphone. "Close your mouth," House announced over the mike. "The birds are pooping everywhere."
Wilson burst out laughing. Clunk, clunk, clunk went the MRI as House redirected his attention to studying the images in front of him. "Take thin slices," Wilson announced from inside the MRI. "Shut your mouth," House replied, "or I'll grant a miracle and give the birds better aim."
House deliberately left the mike from the control room open. He positioned his iPOD in front of the mike. He deliberately selected music that would irritate Wilson the most, a dirge-like Bach fugue, and played it at top volume while he considered and tried to confirm his theory that this was all a huge waste of time. The puzzle changed when House finished examining the images before him with a fine tooth comb; images that confirmed there was nothing physically wrong with Wilson's brain. He propped his legs up on the console, switched the music off, and considered his next move.
Option one, of course, was to harangue Wilson about the needless test, yank him out of the scanner and remind his partner for the millionth time that he was an idiot.
Option two was to shut up and concede that Wilson might actually be sick. Sure, the body was most likely fine. But there's more to a person than their body. House began to drum his fingers on the console surface, playing with anything within reach in alert anticipation of the puzzle he was presented with. Oh, this is gonna be fun!
House had, for years, decried psychiatric practitioners. He of course recognized that the field of psychiatry was a legitimate and interesting field of medicine. He'd read enough psychiatric journals to have reached the conclusion early on that psychiatric illnesses were well documented. Psychiatric diagnoses and treatment plans were thoroughly supported by research. He didn't have a problem respecting the field of psychiatric medicine. He had a problem respecting most of its practitioners that he'd met. Psychiatrists, psychologists, whatever. House considered most of them to be quacks.
But that changed when he'd suffered his own psychiatric illness. He'd met many psychiatrists at medical conventions and in daily dealings with people at the hospital though out the years , and he'd had a particularly frustrating experience with a psychiatrist when he had his infarction. His physicians thought he was a crazy drug seeker when he injected himself with Demerol, so a psychiatrist had been called for a consult. Before he had his own psychiatric illness, House thought that most of the psychiatrists he'd met tended to constantly defend their profession, talking about their specialty as though they were on a par with God Himself. House used to think that people who had to defend their profession were not confident enough in their professional abilities to be proficient at their jobs. In other words, he thought they were all quacks. Of course it probably didn't help that House belittled and berated them, calling them idiots to their faces, forcing them into a position of having to defend their specialty or just give up and fold under the pressure of House's bitterness toward them. Some of them probably were idiots, but no doubt there were some good psychiatrists in the bunch that just couldn't hold their own against a formidable personality like House's.
Life pulls some nasty punches, though, and even the mightiest fall sooner or later. House had eventually been forced to accept psychiatric help. His experiences in Mayfield and subsequently had shown him that there are times when nobody has all the answers, but there are psychiatrists like Nolan who had most of the answers most of the time and could equip their patients with the tools to find answers too. Just like House, Nolan had the confidence to do what was right for the patient, even when the consequences for doing the right thing might make "doing the right thing" too risky. For example, threatening to transfer House to another psych hospital after Freedom Master jumped out of that parking garage. Threatening to transfer him at that time was the right thing to do because it had the desired effect and made House realize once and for all that he really did need Nolan's help and he needed to stay at Mayfield. But the potential risk of course was that Nolan's own bosses, the administrative board, could have forced him to follow through on his threat to transfer House out. Nolan's threat could easily have backfired. Nolan knew that and took the risk anyway. It paid off.
While Wilson waited inside the MRI, House pondered the considerable irony that now he was mentally healthy and Wilson might very well need psychiatric care.
"Are you even still there?" Wilson called out from inside his 21st century General Electric cocoon. "House!" he cried out. Claustrophobia is an awful thing.
"Leave a message after the beep," House droned. "Beeeeeeeep"
"Get me out of here!" Wilson cried frantically.
House waited a few seconds longer, until he thought Wilson might just explode out of there on his own, like toothpaste when the tube is squeezed too forcefully. House replied "Relax, Wilson. I'm just joshin' you. Let's get you out of there before you crap your pants." With that, House pressed the button and a very diaphoretic Wilson emerged from the MRI.
"You kept me prisoner in there after you knew the test was done!" Wilson panted, eagerly jumping off the MRI table and glaring at House.
That wasn't entirely true, of course. House's mind had simply kicked into overdrive when he saw the obviously healthy images, like it always did when presented with interesting cases. Unfortunately, Wilson had to wait inside the MRI machine a few agonizing minutes longer than necessary while House was temporarily distracted by the irony of the situation. For years, Wilson insisted that House was the one who needed psychiatric care. Now the tables were turned.