"So, you're finally writing the story you should have written first…second, from the second song you listened to," Wendy said sarcastically. "This is going really well so far." Montana-Bob was face-planted with his forehead against his desk.
As nonchalantly as he could, he pulled his phone from his pocket and, holding it out of sight under the desk, sent a text message to Stan: Come and get your woman before I strangle her.
Chapter Track: Dr. Feelgood – Motley Crue
Crossover With: House, M.D.
Summary: House declared Kenny dead three days ago; how could he have just shown up an hour ago as a new patient?
Disclaimer: I own none of the above (except Montana-Bob).
Dr. Gregory House threw his marking pen against the white board in frustration. "You idiots" he said angrily, turning around to glare at his team sitting around the conference room table.
Drs. Foreman and Chase sat back, looking at each other, puzzled. "What's the problem now, House?" Foreman asked. "You have the patient's history, family medical history…"
House looked at the chart he had been holding to write notes on the white board. "You've given me the wrong patient's chart, you morons!"
Foreman and Chase looked at each other, now clearly worried. Mixing up a patient's chart was almost as grievous an error as giving a patient the wrong medication.
"House," Foreman said cautiously, "That is the right chart; Chase and I both confirmed the patient's name with the admitting nurse, the patient's boyfriend kept calling him by the same name that's on the chart, and they both insisted on seeing you…"
House's eyes narrowed at the word 'boyfriend'. He looked at the chart again, specifically at a line that normally was of no interest to him: Patient Name: McCormick, Kenneth. It was the mention of the boyfriend that suddenly had him worried.
Deeply concerned about something much worse than a misidentified patient, House abruptly picked up his cane from the white board and hobbled from the room, throwing a "wait here" over his shoulder as he limped into the hallway.
"Um…" Dr. Chase said a long moment later. "I'm sure this is a test of some sort. Are we really supposed to wait here like he said…or should we be following him?"
"He didn't say where he was going," Dr. Allison Cameron observed, uncrossing and recrossing her ankles under the table. "But if he took the chart with him, and thinks we have the wrong patient…"
"He's going to go see the patient!" Foreman and Chase said together. That was all it took to get them moving; three chairs squeaked across the floor simultaneously as they rose together to hurry after him.
House had reached the elevators, stepped into one and pushed the button to take him to the second floor. He saw his best friend, Dr. James Wilson, walking down the hall to join him and swung his cane up as the elevator door began closing. The door bounced off the cane and trundled open again.
"Thanks, House," Wilson said once he was standing beside him and they were waiting for the door to close. "So…where are you zooming off to this early?"
"I'm going to see a patient, Wilson!" he replied with unusual cheerfulness, knowing Wilson would jump all over that, and trying not to let anything into his voice that would betray the fact that he was actually terrified of what he might find once he'd done so.
"My feet suddenly got very cold, House. Hell must have just frozen over."
"Now, now, cynicism is my shtick; you need to find something else and make it your own... although the innocent boy scout has always worked well for you." They saw House's office door fly open and his team hurrying toward the elevator. House used his cane to once again block the elevator door from closing, and seeing this, they slowed down. "And are we having lunch later?"
"I have surgery at eight," Wilson replied. "I should be finished by 12:30. Am I buying again?"
"Don't you usually?" When House's team was fifteen feet away, he raised his cane again, only this time to stab the "close door" button. The elevator door slid shut, Foreman's annoyed look the last thing they saw of them before the door closed.
"Nice, House," Wilson said, laughing.
House smiled in return. "I'm just keeping them on their toes."
There was a moment of companionable silence. "So…" Wilson finally said. "To what does…" he took the patient chart House was holding and looked it over. "Kenneth McCormick owe the pleasure of a personal visit from you? This looks like simple pneumonia in an otherwise healthy young adult."
"I'm a doctor, Wilson. How am I going to diagnose my patient properly without examining him?"
The door opened on the second floor. "House, there are so many things wrong with what you just said I don't know where to start. Hold that thought and we'll continue this later over bad cafeteria food."
"Have a nice surgery Wilson." House limped down the hallway, his thigh aching more than usual. He badly wanted a couple Vicodin to at least take the edge off of the pain, but he also realized it could be a very bad idea right now. When House entered the private patient room of Kenneth McCormick, his worst fears were realized. He recognized the man lying in the bed with an I.V. going into his arm, as well as the very worried looking blond haired boyfriend holding his other hand. House even remembered his name: Leopold, but he preferred to be called 'Butters.' House had declared this patient dead three days ago.
His lips tightened as he remembered how painful detoxing from Vicodin had been, and walked over to the bed, looked at them for a moment, and shook his head. "I'm sorry. I know you came all the way from Colorado to see me, but I can't take your case. I have an excellent team of diagnosticians who…"
"We don't want to see your team!" Butters said, angry as well as frightened now. "We came here to see you!"
House was giving Kenny a very long and wary look. "I'm sorry…I can't." He turned suddenly to leave.
"Hold it!" Kenny said loudly and went into a coughing fit. Butters helped him sit up and gently thumped his back, and when Kenny could breathe again he gasped out, "You at least owe us an explanation."
House stopped and, after a long moment, turned to face them again. Kenny saw a look in his eyes that even Dr. Wilson had only seen a couple of times: Genuine fear. The last time Wilson had seen it was two years ago, just before House had checked himself into rehab.
"I'll talk to you…alone," he finally said, looking from Kenny to Butters. Kenny stared back for a moment, then reached up with the arm that didn't have an I.V. line in it and stroked Butters' cheek. Butters suddenly looked hurt.
"Aw, Kenny…really? There's something you can say to him that you can't say in front of me?"
"Just for a few minutes, love." Kenny took his hand again and squeezed. "You want me to get well, right?"
Butters nodded sadly. "Oh…okay."
He slowly walked to the door, and as he was leaving the room, House called after him: "Don't let anyone from my team in this room!"
House limped to the other side of the bed and sat in the chair Butters had vacated. "Well," he began, and for once had no idea what to say in follow up.
"We researched you, dude," Kenny implored when House seemed reluctant to speak. "We know you're the best diagnostician in the country; it's why we came to you. Why won't you help me?"
"My team—"
"We didn't come here to see your team, Goddammit."
House sighed, thinking that perhaps he owed this 'man' an explanation, even if he wasn't really there. House wondered if he was in bed dreaming, or standing in his kitchen (or his bedroom closet, or his office) having this conversation with a wall. "If you researched me carefully enough, you'd know I was hospitalized two years ago and went into rehab."
"Yes, for Vicodin addiction. We know about that, and we don't care. What does this have to…"
"Because it's starting again. After rehab, I needed the Vicodin again for my leg, and I thought I had it under control this time, but it seems I was wrong. I was hallucinating right before I went for treatment two years ago, and I'm hallucinating you right now. It's…impossible for you to be here."
Kenny's eyes widened as he suddenly realized what was troubling him. Oh shit…
"So…" Kenny said cautiously. "Were you the one who declared me dead three days ago?"
Dr. House stared at Kenny, rendered speechless for a moment by that question, something which no interaction with a patient had ever done in quite this way before. He finally replied warily, "You were dead. I did CPR for fifteen minutes on you. Your boyfriend acts like he doesn't even remember that-"
"What if I told you that you aren't hallucinating, Dr. House? What if I told you that I'm actually real…and that I know I died here three days ago, no one except you remembers it, and I'm going to die again soon if you don't cure me this time?"
"The hallucination is telling me I'm not hallucinating," House replied. "If you were real, you'll understand why I'm not comforted by that line of reasoning."
Kenny decided to switch tactics; this was uncharted territory. "Dr. House…I know this is going to be hard for you to believe. But I've died, like, hundreds of times…and I always come back again a day or so later. Usually the people around me don't remember anything about it afterward; you're only the third person who ever has." He sat up straighter because this next point really needed to be emphasized. "I can't explain it any better than that. I'm asking you to help me, and whether you believe me or not, no one else can ever know about this; not your team, and definitely not Butters. It…let's just say it'll lead to consequences neither of us wants to deal with."
"And they'll just think I'm hallucinating anyway." It occurred to him that, hallucination or not, this was one of the most interesting conversations he'd had in awhile. Perhaps that wasn't such a bad thing; after all, he'd learned some interesting things about himself the last time he was hallucinating talking to dead people. A conversation with Wilson's dead girlfriend had once helped him solve a case and save a patient's life.
"So, how does this work, your dying and coming back? Where do you go when you're dead?"
"I'll tell you what, Dr. House: If you get me well and don't let me die again, I'll take you out, get you as drunk as you want and tell you all about it. We're also going to make a nice donation to this hospital, as long as Butters doesn't find out anything about this. And even if I am just a hallucination, you have to admit this will be interesting. Fair enough?"
House's lips quirked in a rare smile. "Fair enough. So, how do I begin treating a hallucination?"
"Start by telling me this: What happened after I died three days ago?"
House's eyes narrowed. "We got some lab work back on you, two hours later," he said bitterly; losing a patient was always a personal affront to him, especially when one was lost over something as simple as recalcitrant pneumonia. "It turns out we were treating you for the right disease, but in the wrong way. We treated you for pneumonia, but we were using the standard protocol of broad spectrum antibiotics; but it turned out that you were infected with a particularly resistant strain of Staph aureus, and what you needed was a stronger and more targeted antibiotic. In other words…" Dr. House shook his head, looking at the I.V. bag hanging over Kenny's bed. "We gave you the ten cent pill, when we should have given you the hundred dollar one."
"So, give me the hundred dollar pill now," Kenny said. "Before it's too late, and I die again."
House bowed his head. "That would be…impossible to do." He hated the word 'impossible'. "In order to prescribe that, I need to be able to medically justify it, which I can't because we don't have your current lab results back yet, and there's no record here-" He held up Kenny's chart. "…of your previous lab tests. I just remember them…"
His train of thought suddenly derailed. The usual brand of straightforward logic he would normally apply could never work in a unique situation like this, or he'll just repeat what happened three days ago. He thought back to that awful moment when this patient had suddenly and unexpectedly taken a turn for the worse. He had gone from ill to dead in the space of just a few minutes, and even though the nurses had performed their jobs perfectly, rushing into the room with the crash cart seconds after his monitors had flatlined, and even though Dr. House himself had performed CPR for almost fifteen minutes, Kenny had died. His memory of Butters' scream when he had finally stepped back from the bed and shook his head had awoken him from nightmares every night since.
He really hated the word 'impossible'.
"All right," House said, standing up and setting his cane firmly in front of him. "You know what? Let's forget protocol. I'm pretty sure the Hippocratic Oath can apply to hallucinations too. At least the 'do no harm' part is safe."
He limped to the door and opened it just wide enough to stick his unshaven face through. "Hey, Butters!"
Butters looked over Dr. Foreman's shoulder. For a moment, House looked like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, sticking his face through the door he had just destroyed with an axe and shouting 'Here's Johnny!'
"I—I'll see you later, fallas," he said, hurrying back to Kenny's room, leaving Drs. Forman and Chase looking confused in his wake.
"This is going to seem really weird Butters," Kenny had a hopeful look in his eyes. "But Dr. House is going to help us. It's just going to be a bit unorthodox."
"I need to get something out of the Pharmacy," Dr. House explained. "Without Marco the only Pharmacist on the planet with eyes all around his head catching me doing it. Can you distract him long enough?"
"Butters is the most distracting thing currently this side of the Mississippi," Kenny said, reaching out to take Butters' hand and lacing his fingers through it. "You should have plenty of time to stock up on whatever you need for a month."
Butters looked at Kenny and laughed. "What do you think Kenny? Should I wiggle my ass or use the scatterbrained housewife routine?"
"Scatterbrained housewife, definitely." House answered for him. "Marco is impervious to the wiles of the male ass. I'll go in first; come in about one minute after me."
House left the room and hobbled across the hall to the hospital pharmacy. Marco, the pharmacist on duty, already knew not to let Dr. House anywhere near where the narcotics were stored but House made an immediate right turn into the area where the antibiotics were instead.
"Can I help you find something, Dr. House?" He certainly wasn't trying to steal Vicodin and might even be looking for something important.
"Just seeing what germ killing potions you have available in case I need some for a patient," House replied. Butters entered the pharmacy at that moment and made his way immediately to the 'over the counter' section. He spent mere moments glancing over the rows of brightly colored packages before grabbing three items and setting them on the counter beside the cash register. House tipped his chin toward the counter. "Why don't you go help your customer? I'll let you know if I need anything."
"Excuse me, sir," Butters said when he had Marco's attention. "But can you tell me what the difference is between these two medicines?" He pushed two packages closer to Marco: Benadryl tablets and a bottle of 'generic allergy relief' pills.
Marco didn't have to pick up either one to reply. "Well sir, they both contain 25 milligrams of the same ingredient, Diphenhydramine Hydrochloride. One is just the generic version so it costs less…but they both do the same thing."
"Then, what's the difference between these two?" Butters moved the Benadryl back and pushed a bottle of 'generic sleep aid' in its place, like he was moving a couple of chess pieces on a board only he could see. "They both have the same thing, Diphen…Diphenhydra…"
"Diphenhydramine Hydrochloride," the pharmacist repeated, less patiently this time.
"Right!" Butters chirped. "Diphenhydramine Hydrochloride." He pronounced it perfectly this time. "Except these're both 25 milligrams of the same ingredient, both bottles have 24 pills in them, but the sleep aid costs twice as much as the allergy relief medicine! Does that mean it costs two times more to treat insomnia as it does allergies with the same medicine?" Butters was blinking his eyes in a way that would have made Kenny want to spend the rest of the day in bed with him. It made Marco simply want to give this strange customer all three bottles free of charge just to get rid of him.
House chuckled, finally spotting the slim clear I.V. bag of the antibiotic he was looking for. If things went well and didn't head south in the next six hours, he thought he might enjoy having a conversation with this 'Butters' guy as well. He shook his head, hoping his latest bout with psychosis passed, not even sure if he was psychotic (because all this seemed pretty goddamn real) and plucked the clear bag from the shelf, slid it into the pocket of his lab coat and turned to limp toward the door. Butters was still prattling on.
"And if I bought the cheaper allergy medicine to treat my insomnia, would it still work?"
"I've seen what I need Marco!" House said brightly, pausing at the door to lean on his cane. It was all he could do not to laugh at the flustered look in the pharmacist's eyes as he looked up at him for a moment. Butters had managed to thoroughly rattle the poor guy, and House wondered if there would ever be a way he could tell Wilson about this.
He limped across the hall, his thigh hurting terribly, but he realized that, no matter how all this turned out, he was probably going to have to give up his beloved Vicodin again.
"I'm going to have to monitor you for all kinds of possible side effects," Dr. House told Kenny a minute later as he hooked up the I.V. bag to the line already going into Kenny's arm. "You could have liver or renal failure, an allergic reaction… I'm supposed to perform all sorts of lab work before giving you this medication." He looked up for a moment as the door opened and Butters came in, closing the door in Dr. Foreman's face. Then he looked back at his patient, watching for any signs of an immediate allergic reaction as the antibiotic began running into his arm. Everything seemed fine, and House settled in for a long afternoon.
0-0-0-0-0
At 1:30, Wilson walked in the door carrying two Styrofoam cafeteria 'to go' boxes and two large drinks. Butters jumped up to stop him from coming in, but House held up his cane, blocking him.
"It's okay." House lowered his cane once Butters had stopped. "Wilson's a friend…aren't you, Dr. Wilson?"
Dr. Wilson looked around the room cautiously. Just the fact that House was actually visiting a patient was strange enough; the fact that he'd been in here all morning (and had skipped out on a free lunch) was positively unnerving.
"Of course I am," Wilson replied. His eyes silently asked House: What are you doing? He handed House his lunch and pulled another chair from the corner and sat next to him.
House opened his lunchbox and immediately pulled the bun off the top of the hamburger. He pulled three pickle slices off the congealed cheese and ketchup on top of the burger and held them up.
"Pickle?" He asked, looking at Butters. Butters reached out and eagerly took the pickle slices from House.
"Sure!" He put all three in his mouth together and crunched on them, his eyes flicking from House to Wilson like he was watching a ping pong game.
"So House," Wilson said a few moments later. "Since you're not going to come out and tell me, I'll just ask: What's going on in here?"
House put the bun back on his de-pickled burger and lifted it from the Styrofoam box; some of the cheese clung to the box, tearing part of the bun off. "I'm treating a patient." He bit into the cold hamburger, giving Wilson a look as if what was 'going on' should be obvious.
Wilson nodded. "And I take it that this is something Dr. Cuddy would be better off not knowing about?"
House swallowed and took a sip of his drink. "You take it correctly Wilson."
Wilson nodded. Years of knowing House meant he knew that, whatever House was doing, it was for the good of his patient. He stood up and went over to Kenny's bed; Kenny and Butters both had their eyes fixed on him as he read the label on the I.V. going into Kenny's arm.
"I suppose this means you're not following the usual protocol for this either." Wilson pulled his penlight from his lab coat pocket and shined it into Kenny's right eye; Kenny offered himself up willingly to this examination while Butters nervously walked over to be by Kenny's side. Wilson moved the light to Kenny's left eye and said, "There's no sign of jaundice. You have a reason for treating him with this potent of an antibiotic." It wasn't a question.
"I'm following my gut Wilson."
That was all Dr. Wilson needed to hear. He quickly examined Kenny's fingernails, pinched the skin on the back of Kenny's hand checking for dehydration, checked his pulse and found it was strong and steady, and finally turned back to House and nodded.
"Then I'll leave you to it then. And I should probably go and distract your team." He glanced toward the glass wall where Drs. Chase and Foreman were hovering just outside.
0-0-0-0-0
At just after five in the afternoon as the setting sun was shining in the window, Butters stood up and announced: "I gotta go take the browns to the superbowl."
Dr. House looked puzzled, but Kenny burst out laughing immediately, ending with a brief coughing fit. House was pleased with how quickly he recovered.
"Too much information Leopold," Kenny said, knocking his knuckles against Butters' hip as he walked past on his way to the bathroom. Butters looked back and grinned at them just before he flipped on the bathroom light and exhaust fan and closed the door.
"Hey…House?" Kenny said tentatively. "I have a question."
House regarded him a moment, then grabbed his cane and stood up. He leaned over Kenny, listening to his lungs through his stethoscope and liking what he heard. "Yes?"
"I still haven't worked out why I got sick twice from the same disease." Kenny looked like he'd been thinking about this for awhile. "I mean, like, I've died before from being sick. I even died from pneumonia once. Shit, I died from muscular dystrophy about ten years ago, and that one really fucked me up; I was dead for almost a year after that. But anytime I come back, it's like I'm in a brand new body. I shouldn't have gotten sick again from the same thing."
House looked around the hospital room. Everything Kenny had come in with was put away somewhere; he had nothing to go on except intuition.
"Would you have worn the same clothes afterward? Especially anything close to your mouth and nose?"
Kenny's eyes narrowed. "I almost always wear the same parka with the hood pulled up over my face. Could that have done it?"
"It's possible," House said, considering how unlikely it actually was. "You may have harbored bacteria in it and acquired a reinfection that way. So before you leave here this time, leave your parka in that trash basket over there with the bright red liner."
They heard the toilet flush. "I really need to have that conversation with you," Dr. House said urgently. "Even if you are just a hallucination, at least I know you're a part of my mind that's trying to tell me something. I need to figure out what it is."
Kenny nodded. He knew Butters was about to open the bathroom door, and they only had moments for Kenny to convince him he was sincere, even though he wasn't. "We'll talk soon, House."
House discharged Kenny from the hospital late that evening, giving him a prescription for a ten-day course of antibiotics and watching him throw his parka into the 'medical waste' trash can. House went home and had the first good night's sleep he'd had in four days.
He arrived at his office an hour early the next morning. While Drs. Foreman and Chase had coffee and donuts, he used his time to check his computer, finding about what he had expected. There was no record of a patient named Kenneth McCormick on anything he could find, neither from yesterday nor from four days ago. He was disappointed but not particularly surprised, but there was one more thing to check...
He picked up his phone and punched in the first entry in speed dial. "Wilson! That was, ah, quite a day yesterday, wasn't it?"
He could picture Wilson's eyes narrowing as he replied. "House, we…had lunch right after I finished in the O.R., we watched soap operas in coma guy's room for a couple hours, and your team left early to go to a hockey game. It was a perfectly ordinary day."
House nodded, knowing he would have to get off Vicodin again and hoped he could simply do it by himself this time without the indignity and hassle of rehab. There was no proof of the existence of that patient yesterday except his own memories of him, and House no longer trusted those. He was about to tell Wilson about his new bout with narcotics addiction when his office door opened and Dr. Lisa Cuddy, Hospital Administrator and Dean of Medicine, walked in.
House leaned back in his chair and regarded her. "Uh, I'm going to have to call you back. Cuddy just came in, and she has a very feral look in her eyes."
"Is that Dr. Wilson?" she asked. "Because if it is, don't hang up on him! I'm sure he's involved in this somehow too."
He cocked an eyebrow. "What 'this' would you be referring to?"
"This this." She dropped an envelope on his desk. He could hear Wilson on the other end of the phone asking a question which he ignored as he cradled the phone on his shoulder and slid out the envelope's contents.
"Huh!" he said a moment later. There was a check for $50,000 payable to Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (signed by, and drawn on an account from, someone named 'Mysterion'), but it was the other contents that interested him the most. "Two tickets for monster trucks this weekend! Wilson, what are you doing Friday night?"
"Never mind making plans," Cuddy said impatiently. "Do you have any idea who this 'Mysterion' is? I'd like to thank him or her for this very generous donation."
House looked at her with his best I haven't got a clue look. She shook her head, clearly not believing him. "Whatever, House. If someone comes to mind, I know you'll be sure to let me know." She rolled her eyes, took back the check, and left his office.
"So Wilson," House said, looking more closely at the tickets. They were stuck together on one end, and when he separated them, a small piece of paper fell from them onto his lap. "Actually, let me call you back, but keep Friday night open." He hung up before Wilson had a chance to reply.
He picked up the piece of paper. It was a short note in very stylish calligraphy:
Dr. House: Sorry we didn't get to talk. Just know that everything I said was true, and one day we'll have drinks in the afterlife and I'll tell you all about it.
~M~
He smiled, then leaned back in his chair and reached into his pocket for his bottle of Vicodin.
