"This is fun," House declared as he led the way into the conference room. Chase looked up, startled, while Cameron and Foreman dragged out chairs.
"You're calling epilepsy fun now?" Foreman asked, sounding like he was kind of disgusted but not completely surprised.
House took up station against the conference room desk and fixed Foreman with his best contemptuous stare. "Sorry, I thought you were my neurologist. Since when do epileptic seizures present with tachycardia? For that matter, since when does someone with no history of epilepsy suddenly have two seizures in less than two hours? What's fun is that it's so clearly not epilepsy."
"Huh, I must have been out of the room while you were running the EEG," Foreman said sourly.
"Fine, be a stickler, but come on. Did that look like any other epileptic seizure you've ever seen? Think carefully."
"I take it we have a new case," Chase said.
"Yes," House said, and watched the shudder run through his tiny staff. It was already nearly six. Cameron, trying to hide it, looked down at the inventory the nurses had done of the contents of the patient's purse--when someone walks into a hospital and immediately goes into convulsions, you check her purse for drugs. She seemed to fix on something as House filled Chase in on the basics.
"How old is she?" Chase asked.
"I dunno," House said cheerfully. "Cameron, you've got her stuff. How old is she?"
"I'm...not sure," Cameron said, sounding even more befuddled than was usual for one of the ducklings.
House made a face of exaggerated disbelief. "You're telling me you can't do math. Come on, Cameron. Two thousand five minus nineteen seventy something equals...?"
"This says she was born in February of 1976," Cameron said.
"So she's coming up on the big three-oh," House said. "What's so tough there?"
"It also says it was issued in February. Of 2006."
"What?" House said. "That can't be right." Cameron held out the photocopy and House snatched it from her. He looked it over, his brows furrowing.
"OK..." he said after a second of contemplation. "Does Pennsylvania do something weird with driver's licenses? No, wait a second. This other one--" he flicked a finger at the image of the patient's insurance card on the same paper. "--this says her health insurance is through Blue Cross/Blue Shield." Which was cruising for a lawsuit in the worst way; Blue Shield/Blue Cross wasn't going to tolerate that kind of toe-stepping. Which meant...
House clutched the paper to his chest with his eyes half-closed as the realization dawned. "This is so cool," he crooned. Foreman had donned one of his vast array of disapproving expressions, the one that said he was wondering whether to get a straitjacket or just move right to tranq guns; Chase, meanwhile, looked disconcertingly as if he understood House's train of thought. "Unexplained seizures are neat enough," House said after taking a moment to revel, "but now we've got a whole wallet full of fake ID too. I love this woman already." He opened his eyes fully and pointed at Chase. "Go! Get me her purse, her clothes, everything. Fast." He clapped his hands. "Quick like bunny, Chase, get moving." Chase, who was already moving, gave him his usual look, the put-upon one, and House rolled his eyes in deliberate misinterpretation. "I'm sorry I mentioned rabbits, OK? Just go!"
Cameron caught Chase's eye and mouthed the room number at him; he blinked thanks and hurried out. "OK," House said, ignoring the byplay. "While we're waiting, gimme a list of things that can cause grand mal seizures." He pronounced the old-fashioned phrase with gusto. Foreman opened his mouth and House cut him off, "That aren't epilepsy." He grabbed a marker and uncapped it with a flourish.
"Fever," Cameron said. "But she doesn't have one."
"Hypoglycemia," Foreman said. He sounded reluctant, but House didn't care as long as he participated.
"They tested her blood sugar, she's fine," Cameron replied.
"Meningitis, encephalitis, brain tumor. Stroke." House wrote on the board as Foreman listed conditions.
"She didn't have any head trauma, so that's not it," Cameron said.
"Tapeworm," Foreman said, sounding speculative.
"Tapeworms are boring," House cut in. "Anyway we've already done tapeworms. The universe hates to repeat itself." He listed it anyway.
"Any number of drugs," Cameron said. "Tox screen won't be back for a while yet. But according to the inventory there was nothing in her purse."
"Not having it in her purse doesn't mean she doesn't have anything at home," Foreman pointed out.
House said, "True, but when she woke up she seemed awfully put together for someone who'd had enough evil nasty chemicals to give herself a seizure. And then had a second one. Which might also rule out poisons." He wrote "drugs" and "poison" on the board, but followed each word with a question mark. "What else?"
"Alcohol withdrawal, but with that she'd probably have hallucinations too," Cameron said. "Um, can't whooping cough cause convulsions?"
"Born in 1976, she was vaccinated for whooping cough," Foreman said.
"If she was vaccinated," House pointed out. "Her parents could have been morons--or do I mean hippies? I always get those mixed up."
"Systemic lupus erythematosus," Cameron said. House tried not to groan, if only because now he had to remember how to spell it.
"AIP," Foreman said.
"Twice in three months, Foreman?" House said, a little more sharply than was strictly warranted--he admitted, in the privacy of his own head, that a reminder of his ex's husband's exceedingly rare disease was irritating. In his defense it would have been irritating even if the ex in question hadn't been currently crusing for his liver. He hesitated momentarily over the last few letters of "erythematosus", then wrote up AIP. "What else?"
"Epilepsy," Foreman said firmly.
"What part of 'not epilepsy' slipped past you?" House asked. The man was a good doctor--another thing to be mentioned only inside his skull--but sometimes Foreman got the bit in his teeth and just wouldn't let it go.
"The part where you didn't do an EEG."
"Foreman: tachycardia. You felt her pulse when she went under the second time; it was going so fast I couldn't count it and that means it was at least 134."
"148, by the monitor," Foreman said, though without the note of conceding the point that House was waiting for. "Everyone's different. It could be an idiopathic presentation."
"Have I ever mentioned that I loathe the word idiopathic?" House asked the air. He cocked his head at movement in the hallway: Chase, his arms full of cloth and with a purse dangling from one hand. "In the meantime, we have fake ID to peruse."
Half an hour later, Allison looked up from the contents of Ms. Siciunas's wallet. "This makes no sense," she declared. The men looked at her with near-identical expressions of annoyance and she stifled a laugh. Before any of them could make a sarcastic remark, she continued, "All these little details." Her wave took in the half-filled "buy ten get one free" card from a coffee shop, the library card, the pure silver dime and quarter that had been tucked behind the driver's license. "Why go to all this trouble?"
"There's such a thing as a spy," Chase said, sounding as if even he didn't believe what he was saying. "They get very detailed backgrounds."
"You watch too much MI-5," House scoffed. "Anyway, I see where Cameron's going with this. Why go to so much trouble if you're going to get the details wrong?" He picked up the little leather pouch and pulled the comb out of it--the thing looked as if it had been hand-carved. "Why does a spy need a comb made out of--what is this? Bone, antler? Whatever. It's memorable and spies don't want to be memorable." He set the comb down again and held up the silver necklace, letting the star in a circle dangle. "This isn't a Star of David, not enough points. Memorable." The chain hissed against the glass tabletop as he set it down. He poked at the pair of stainless steel rods that Allison thought were hair sticks. "All of this, too memorable. Her check book is filled with transactions rounded up to the next quarter, but none of them have dates later than May fifteenth. So either she went from being anal enough to record a buck seventy-five for breath mints to not caring about her mortgage payment, or she hasn't used her checking since May. Or there's something else going on."
"What else could be going on?" Foreman asked, sounding exasperated. He pushed his chair back from the table and stood. "I'm going to go see if she's hit normal sleep yet. If so I'm running an EEG to confirm epilepsy." He gave House his challenging look, which House neatly deflected by the simple expedient of shrugging.
"Have a good time," their boss said airily. Foreman looked a little lost, like someone who had steeled himself for pain that never came, opened his mouth, closed it again, and went for the door, yanking it with a little more force than was strictly necessary.
House waited until he was gone, and then repeated, in precisely the same tone, "Or there's something else going on."
"I kind of agree with Foreman," Chase said. "I know it doesn't make any sense, but what else could be going on?"
"Amnesia?" Allison said, hating the soap-opera melodrama of it. "She's been out of it since May and being in Pittsburgh is the last thing she remembers. It could be caused by the same thing that's making her seize. Old head trauma."
"That would work if it weren't for the date on the driver's license," House said. "At the moment I'm kind of leaning towards time travel." He sounded entirely too serious and Allison stared at him, aware out of her peripheral vision that Chase was doing it too. He glanced up from the litter of purse contents and grinned. "You two are too easy. When Foreman's done with his EEG, put her through the MRI and look for Cameron's trauma. Get her consent for a paralytic in case she goes into another seizure while she's in the machine."
"She's on an Ativan drip," Allison pointed out.
"Since we don't know what's causing the seizures we don't know if Ativan will help with them," House said.
Chase picked up the driver's license and tapped it against the table. "I hate to say it, but shouldn't we tell the police about this? Fake IDs..."
"If she's got amnesia the fake ID might not be her fault," Allison said.
"And if she's a spy, turning her in could get us all some time in small back rooms," House said, with a little more relish than Allison liked. "Let's figure out what's wrong with her, then we can decide whether to turn her in. In the meantime, we need to find out more about her. For one thing I want to know what 'working for the government' means."
"Yeah...how?" Chase asked. "It's not like we have her records."
"There's this wonderful invention, Chase, it's called the Internet. Google her."
House having taken himself off somewhere, Chase was given permission to use the computer in his office--albeit with dire warnings about avoiding the Favorites menu on pain of something unspecified but menacing--while Allison opened up her laptop. She had sprung for a wireless card for the machine and could have gotten to the hospital's network from the chair in her boss's office, but she was still a little wary of Chase. Not that their...encounter hadn't been fun, and Allison had gotten over being ashamed of sex a long time ago, but she thought it might be a good idea to let memory fade a bit before spending a lot of time in an enclosed space with him, especially an enclosed space that was about fifty percent windows but had a disarming sense of being secluded.
If for no other reason than she was pretty sure that snogging in House's office would cause an explosion of thermonuclear proportions if he found out about it.
Therefore, her first indication that Chase had better Google-fu than she did was the slightly panicked tone of his voice when he called her name from the other side of the wall. "What?" she said, standing up from the conference room desk.
"The patient," Chase said, swiveling House's monitor as much as he could as she entered the office. "She's dead."
"What?" she repeated. "What are you talking about?"
Chase pointed at the screen and said, "Janet Siciunas. Died three days ago in an MVA in Pittsburgh."
"You must have the wrong..." Allison began, but Chase was already shaking his head.
"How many people have you met with that last name?" he said, but she sensed it was a rhetorical question. "It's the right age, the right place, the right description, the right person." Allison leaned over his shoulder, conscious of his warmth even through their respective layers of lab coats, and peered at the screen.
"You're right," she said, completely bewildered. "We need to get House."
Allison couldn't find it in her to object when House ordered the two of them not to tell Foreman about their patient's supposed demise. It was just too damn weird, and Foreman's tolerance for non-medical weird was...low at best.
"Maybe they thought she was dead and the newspaper picked it up, but they managed to save her?" she said, grasping at straws. She knew it was a silly thing to say even before Chase began to object. House had that look on his face, and wasn't really listening.
"If it was that bad, she wouldn't even be walking," Chase pointed out. "Instead she's having seizures five hundred kilometers from where she's supposed to be."
"Foreman won't be done with his EEG for at least an hour," House said, snapping out of his trance with the usual abruptness. "Then I want her MRI. In the meantime I need to think about this." When they didn't move instantaneously he glared at them and said, in a tone of exaggerated patience, "That means get out."
They went.
Notes: Just in case you're wondering, systemic lupus erythematosus can cause seizures--I didn't toss that in just for the joke. Then again, some type or other of lupus can cause just about anything, which is one of the reasons they diagnose it so often. They don't call the falling-down-and-convulsing kind of seizures grand mal much anymore, alas, but House is the kind of guy who'd use the phrase just because it's cool.