The lumbar puncture turns out to be very much what he'd expected, and compared with the memory of the biopsy he'd had years earlier this is but a pinprick.
During the procedure, he lets himself drift into the maelstrom of his own unfiltered thoughts, and finds himself thinking about grass. He imagines running on sunlit field as though dropped into some parallel universe in his head like a moving figure somehow added to a still painting. He's thinking about grass, because there's a faint scent of something lingering in the examination room that reminds him of it. He closes his eyes and focuses as deeply as he can and there it is - the nurse assisting in the procedure clearly lives in a house with water damage, causing its occupants' clothes to smell of damp vegetation.
For Sherlock, the smellscape is one of the worst things in a hospital. It is governed by the congealed odour of too many humans in one place - the smell seems to practically plaster the walls. Also featured are the pungent odours of antiseptic cleaning solutions and the mild but distinct aromas of plastics and rubber used in much of the equipment. All in all, to Sherlock, hospitals smell much like used underwear dunked in methanol and abandoned at a layby.
He has always been sensitive about scent. Taste is closely allied to that very sensation, making him a very picky eater as a child. Many a tantrum had been staged over broccoli and mushrooms and Earl Grey tea - an abomination in his view due to the bergamot it contains. At home, Earl Grey will promptly be poured down the drain regardless of whether John is just about to consume it.
Vanillin, used in many foodstuffs as a cheap substitute for real vanilla pods, makes him practically gag, and he'd never purchase any cosmetic products or foods containing artificial fruit aromas. John had once come home from a date drunk on peach schnapps, some of which he'd managed to slosh on his cardigan. Sherlock had sulked for a full 24 hours after which the smell had finally completely abated from the flat.
There are scents he likes, of course, such as coconut for a reason he hasn't been able to discern; petrichor - which is why the mouldy smell of someone living in a damp-damaged house does not put him off; rosin on wood which immediately conjures an image of his violin; lemon which he tolerates, even in pungent cleaning products. There's also one very particular combination of probably dozens of different nuances which he's partial to: the scent that could only be referred to as John. He'd never tell this to the man, but he could easily tell apart a John who is standing still in a dark room from dozens of others present. There's cotton in the combination; tea, sand, a bit of lavender from those pointless sachets of potpourri Mrs Hudson sticks in their linen closet, and something that does not even have a name. It just is, and nothing smells exactly like it. Were Sherlock feeling sentimental he'd describe it as homely.
He flinches as his back is cleaned with antiseptic that feels ice cold. He then lets himself drift back into the image in his head - the sunlight, the quiet rustling of the field, and the susurrus of insects on the flowers. The scene has the unreal, overly romanticized and garishly coloured gloss of memory, since what he's imagining are the fields behind his childhood home in Surrey instead of some generic summer landscape.
The only thing that, at one point, manages to penetrate into his thoughts, is a prick of a needle and the smarting of the local anaesthetic on his back.
The smarting comes most likely from lidocaine. 2-diethylamino-N-2-6-dimethylphenylacetamide, in the past also used to treat ventricular tachycardias; blocks sodium channels, and prevents neurons from transmitting their signals to the central nervous system. He almost snorts - as though he'd benefit from losing even more of his nerve functions. He might point the irony out to John later, but then again John never appreciates such intellectual revelations up to the point of laughing at them with him. John smiles, but his delight is more directed at what he sees as Sherlock's own peculiarity instead of an appreciation of scientific facts.
Unlike others, John does not mock him with his smile. Instead, John considers him endearing.
That's what John had actually said out loud, just once, to Sherlock's great astonishment. Granted, John had been rather drunk at the time, but the sentiment had sounded genuine. He doubts John had remembered saying such a thing the next day, but Sherlock certainly still does. 'You're endearing sometimes, you know', had been John's exact words when he'd found Sherlock sleeping on the couch, half of him buried under a morning coat stolen from a murder suspect and a forensic entomology textbook under his cheek onto which he may or may not have drooled a little, at least according to John. Pure conjecture, of course.
Endearing. Insinuating Sherlock is, in some capacity, dear to him, inspiring of affection and adoration. The word is akin to a claim that Sherlock is capable of creating a feeling in John denoting protectiveness and warm sympathy. He'd found those synonyms in the dictionaries he'd consulted along with 'cute, delightful, lovely, charming, enchanting, beguiling' and 'attractive'. He'd dissected the word like a corpse after hearing it, hopeful and desperate to decipher its hidden meanings. In the end he'd realized the key had not even been the word itself but the slight embarrassment visible in John's demeanour right after he'd said it, as though he'd caught himself making some important admission he hadn't really meant to utter out loud. Even when inebriated, there are some things John does not joke about.
Endearing is a word that operates quite comfortably both in the realm of friendship, and in the world of romantic attachment. It had felt as though John's embarrassment had meant he was sitting on the fence between.
There had been a very good case after that confusing minor incident. The mystery of John's words had thus remained unsolved, diluted by the excitement and the mania of the chase. It still doesn't mean that Sherlock would have forgotten it, not at all. That moment is very safely hidden in his Mind Palace, where he can access it anytime he wants. It's just that the more time passes, the less convinced he is of finding anything more in it than the lukewarm commitment of camaraderie.
Sherlock is jolted from his thoughts by someone tapping his shoulder. "All done, Mr Holmes," the voice of a neurology registrar who'd been recruited to do the procedure tells him.
He nods automatically, and the sights and sounds of the small operating room - more of a suture room, really - begin to register. He's still lying on his side on a narrow operating table. He creeps his hand behind his back, unable to really move his fingers but still giving in to the impulse to try and touch the spot where the spinal fluid sample had been taken. With clumsy movements, he manages to locate the spot with his wrist, finding a small gauze taped into place.
"Everything went fine," the doctor who is now snapping off his gloves assures him. The sound of the rubber stretching and then snapping grates on his nerves, and most likely the whole routine is completely unnecessary - is it something doctors think they're expected to do, along with throwing the balled-up gloves into a bin with a metallic clang? Is it a sensory award of some sort for a job well done? He should ask John sometime. 'Do you snap and donk your gloves, John?' will probably not be anywhere close to the strangest thing he has ever asked the man.
He knows he ought to be worrying about himself, not going off on a tangent about gloves. It's just that this is how he awards and consoles himself, really - allowing the barrage of information he registers all the time to fling his consciousness in random directions. It's like starting at a Wikipedia page and three hours later realizing one had ended up reading 34 pages more with increasing disconnection from the original topic. He tends to avoid Wikipedia for this very reason. There's always something more, something he just can't force himself to ignore.
Most of the time he has to fight the onslaught of information that the world feeds to him, keep it in check, deflect most of it. Now that he's being towed along the corridors of this hospital like a resuscitation dummy he might as well let go a little. He's tired, and that's when things tend to leak in and out anyway - there are occasions when his control really begins to slip. If that happens when he's working, he rambles on with his deductions even when no one is listening, and seems to jump into conclusions at crime scenes, when in reality there's an unbroken chain of logic there but he has traversed it so quickly even his considerable verbal prowess ends up lacking in speed. Letting all the information in is a good distraction as long as he doesn't need to try engaging with the universe at the same time. Exhaustion both removes some filters, and helps him focus on the data that seems to scream the loudest. He doesn't sleep during cases, because being extremely tired sometimes helps him see the forest for the trees, to focus on the important things instead of trying to organize every single bit of data trickling into his head.
When he finds himself overwhelmed by the universe there are certain things he deliberately steers his mind towards in order to keep it in check. Lately, the roads of his thought processes always tend to arrive at a singular destination: John. His proverbial Rome.
Sherlock has barely settled back into his spot at the A&E, when John strides in and purposefully begins carting him off someplace again.
"What now?" Sherlock exclaims angrily, having decided he isn't going to put up with this anymore - with John keeping him in the dark.
"We've got you an opening at the MRI - they had a cancellation on a slot reserved for an ITU patient," John replies, slightly out of breath as he parks the trolley right in front of a set of lifts. "I'm not waiting for the transport office to get their business sorted out this time in case they get tired of waiting and give that timeslot to someone else."
As much as Sherlock appreciates John's conviction, he's had it with the cloak and dagger routine. As John is about to press the lift call button, Sherlock shifts on the bed so that his back is leaning on it, covering it from view. He would have slapped his palm on the button to prevent John from using it, were he able to. He can't splay his fingers, nor can he really lift his arm high enough.
John seems to catch his drift. He straightens his spine, rakes a hand through his hair impatiently and lets go of the bed. "What?" he asks, exasperated.
"Why do I need an MRI?" Sherlock asks, trying his damnedest to keep his tone neutral despite his rising irritation.
John tries to reach behind him to press the button. Sherlock leans to the right and glares at the man.
"Why do I need an MRI, John?" he repeats, every syllable crisp and loud.
"The CT rules out some things, but an MRI gives a better view of the spine and the soft tissues of your brain. The CT will show blood, large tumours and other major changes, but for more subtle stuff the MRI is better."
"That explains why people in general might want an MRI. It tells me nothing of why you'd drag me back down to radiology to get one."
John exhales in the deliberately slow manner he seems to use when he needs to calm himself down and buy himself time to figure out how to deal with Sherlock.
That's what people have always told him they are forced to do, to deal with him. As though it's a special skillset taught only to the hardiest of law enforcement and healthcare professionals.
John deals with him all the time. Why can't he answer this simple question without making a fuss?
"I can't tell you your diagnosis because there isn't one yet. Just a general idea, nothing conclusive. Besides, I'm not your doctor right now."
"Really? My mistake. I had no idea you'd been demoted to deliveryman."
John ignores his barb. "You've been extraordinarily patient tonight. I'll give you that. I'll - we'll tell you everything once we get to the bottom of this. If I give you what we've got now, you're just going to go off on some wild theory of your own and drive yourself nuts. You never leave the medicine to actual doctors. Maybe this time you should."
"Whatever happened to patient rights? I could request a copy of my records and results, couldn't I, regardless of whether you think it's a bright idea that I know what's going on?"
"Requests like that take hours to process."
"Tell me!" Sherlock demands.
"You can't wait forty minutes for this? Forty minutes, then the MRI's done, and instead of educated guesses you'd get facts. I could list you the differential diagnoses, but I doubt you'd have heard of all of them. Your head's just going to go round in circles."
Sherlock scoffs, and prepares to remind John that while he hadn't dragged himself through the tedium of medical college, his knowledge of the field is substantial in scope. But before he can launch into this plan of attack, John says three words that somehow disarm him and deflate whatever ire he might have been willing to direct at the man: "Trust me, please. I know you, and nothing good will come out of it if we let your imagination run wild at this point. Please," John adds. In general, that word has never stopped Sherlock in his tracks, but this is John, and he finds himself strangely unwilling not to grant him what he wants. Sentiment and exhaustion are clearly making him pliable and weak and John is taking advantage of it. Perhaps John has been taking lessons from Mycroft in dealing with him.
Sherlock shifts on the bed, finally allowing John access to the lift controls.
Sherlock will consent to this, but the minute they return to A&E he's going to figure all of this out with or without John's help.
The MRI he enjoys even less than the lumbar puncture. The machine is loud even through the headphones, and once the hypothetical thought of what it would be like to be forgotten in the machine for some reason while the rising paralysis spreads and consumes him refuses to abate, despite his best efforts at staying rational.
Before starting the scan, the MRI technician had given him a signal button and immediately scurried away. He probably hadn't realized that Sherlock might be incapable of using it since his pincer grip has now disappeared. The button lies on his stomach like a dead insect.
At least the double vision that has been coming and going, distorting lines and making him slightly dizzy, seems to have resolved on its own. He will probably be able to use his phone now, if he can manage to turn on the voice control option.
"I should be the one to tell him," John's voice says on the other side of the already familiar flimsy paper curtain separating his bed from the other poor buggers currently stuck at the A&E department. It's been an hour since he'd returned from the MRI suite, and everything is grating on his nerves, most of all the pointless waiting for someone to finally come and tell him what the hell is going on.
At the sound of John's voice, Sherlock perks up and painstakingly shoves his phone under the pillow. According to some information posters that have certainly seen better days, the use of mobile phones is supposedly banned at the A&E department. Still, no casualties have seemed to have resulted from his frantic googling.
"We haven't received all the results yet, and usually this sort of a diagnosis isn't discussed until the patient has been transported to a ward where it can be done in a quiet and private environment. Besides, you being the one to convey this information would be highly irregular, Dr Watson. We would be opening ourselves up to a complaint about who was allowed-" the person speaking is clearly one of the doctors, but his voice is unfamiliar. Likely a consultant from some other unit brought into take on Sherlock's care from here on.
"Nobody's going to be filing anything, least of all him. I know him. I can get through to him. Look, he's going to practically smell it on us that we've got something, and he's going to torture everyone in the vicinity until he gets to the truth. Better just get it out in the open right now, and better it be me than someone who's not used to his particular brand of impolite."
"Very well," John's new verbal sparring partner capitulates.
All the doctors Sherlock has encountered during this visit so far, have seemed fairly competent but overworked. From their standpoint John is probably taking a load off their shoulders by volunteering to lead this discussion.
The news clearly isn't good - John wouldn't be insisting on being the one to break them to him otherwise. Then again, Sherlock will hardly be shocked. He's not even going to be mildly surprised. He got that done and over with about thirty minutes ago. At least he hopes so. Sometimes these things catch up to him later.
He feels quite calm. Everything feels slightly unreal.
The curtain is pulled aside, revealing John and the other doctor. This new colleague of John's takes up a position standing at the foot of the trolley.
After lowering the side bars John sits down on the blanket covering most of the trolley, next to Sherlock's knees. Sherlock suspects this isn't actually allowed. He finds he's quite thankful for John's willingness to bend the rules for him.
John lays a palm on Sherlock's right shin, which he feels, but only vaguely.
John looks serious, unflinchingly so - he isn't shying away from meeting Sherlock's eyes. There's still a veil of detachment in the way with which he's regarding Sherlock. Mannerisms. Learned behaviour. Ritual. Sherlock had thought he'd got through to John in the lift lobby, but clearly the army doctor still controls the microphone and John the blogger, his John, has been shoved into some proverbial broom closet for the time being.
The touch on his leg feels strange - patchy, since the whole leg is still in pins and needles. It feels as though there's a thick blanket between him and John, when in reality it's bare skin against bare skin. A trick of the mind - his brain expecting the visual sensory input to match the touch. It's as disconcerting as the EMG had been.
"Sherlock, do you know what myelin sheaths are?"
What does John take him for, an elementary school pupil? What sort of an inane quiz is this?
The doctor at the end of the bed is frowning. This approach can't be how the doctors are taught to dish out bad news.
On second thought, it is actually quite clever of John, engaging Sherlock's intellect instead of putting on some dog and pony show taught at a medical college seminar on the subject of telling people that they've got cancer or Parkinson's or some other terrifying thing.
He doesn't need such theatrics, does he? He can take cold facts, absorb them and act accordingly. He's not going to turn into some irrational, blubbering mess just because he's told bad news by a physician. He'd like to think he's above all that. "Of course I do," Sherlock elects to reply, slightly insulted. This is, after all, basic neurobiology. "They surround peripheral nerves, making them conduct electrical impulses faster than nonmyelinated fibres."
"And do you know what happens when those sheaths are damaged or destroyed?" John asks, and his tone is a strange mix of the one he uses to demand Sherlock solve a puzzle as quickly as possible so that no one will get hurt, and the careful, tentative one he uses to try and coax Sherlock to do something he hates.
"Conduction velocity suffers and impulses might not travel at all."
"When it's the immune system attacking them, it's called Guillain-Barré syndrome," John says. Did his voice just waver the slightest bit? On the other hand, he sounds as though he's lecturing to medical students. The other doctor is nodding like a bobblehead. Imbecile.
Sherlock commands his brain not to adhere to the name John has just said out loud. He's not going to wallow. He's going to engage in this discussion without succumbing to hysterics. "Which type?" he asks, proud of his own disinterested tone and the fact that this is going to catch John off guard. Serves John right for assuming Sherlock wouldn't put the pieces together before someone deigned to tell him the truth.
John's hand drops to the thin sheet covering the trolley's squeaky mattress. "What?" he blurts out.
"Which subtype? Acute inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, Acute motor axonal neuropathy, Acute motor and sensory axonal neuropathy, the pharyngeal-cervical-brachial variant, Bickerstaff brainstem encephalitis or the Miller-Fisher syndrome?" Sherlock recites flawlessly.
John's eyes go wide. Then the penny drops. "All right then, how long have you known?"
Sherlock scoops out the phone from underneath his pillow, which John picks up to glance at the screen which is showing the Mayo Clinic website article Sherlock had been reading. "Long enough."
"It seems we've been bested by Dr Google," John tells the other doctor, whose own phone begins to ring. The man steps back and disappears behind the curtain, starting a hushed conversation barely within earshot of John and Sherlock.
"Of course you would have already figured it out," John says, mostly to himself, sounding like he's berating someone. Himself, probably.
Sherlock manages to lock his phone screen by manoeuvring it to lie against his thigh and pressing the side of his palm against the button. His fingers are utterly useless. He drags his hands to rest on his thighs, looking expectant.
"We don't know yet. The first one, most likely. It's the commonest. It'll become clearer once the symptoms develop further," John tells him.
"Get worse, you mean."
John's smile is apologetic and it doesn't reach his eyes.
Sherlock feels like screaming, He wants John, not this roundaboutly communication trained physician. He wants John, who will tell him the entire truth without pitying or mollycoddling him.
"Yeah. It will probably get worse. How much did you read? The diagnostics bits, surely, but did you get to prognosis?"
"Excellent," Sherlock quotes. "Treatment may shorten the course but there's no cure. Spontaneous resolution expected in more than 90% of cases," Sherlock declaims. His voice sounds foreign in his own ears, akin to listening to himself speak on a tape.
He had read those parts of the articles again and again and again. Most people would rejoice at hearing a number like 90%. Sherlock knows too much about the pitfalls of statistics not to be lulled into a false sense of security. What about the remaining 10%? What about the three percent who will suffer a relapse? What about the five to ten percent whose recovery is delayed or incomplete? 30 percent of those stricken with the disease end up having residual weakness even three years later. 'Death can result from pneumonia, sepsis, adult respiratory distress syndrome and less frequently from pulmonary embolism or an acute manifestation of autonomic dysfunction', the article still open on his phone had told him. 'Mortality varies widely between one and eighteen percent.'
John pats his thigh, this time leaving behind an almost burning sensation.
His nerves have gone mad.
"I know it's a lot to take in," John offers and Sherlock doesn't know what to reply.
Should he admit that yes, of course it must be a heavy load, being told that the next months of his life will imitate some of his nightmares and probably create a few new ones in the process? That somehow even the thought of being buried alive seems, in some fucked-up way, less claustrophobic than what he has gleaned from his reading as to the worst-case scenarios associated with this disease?
Or should he approach this with denial: no, it's not a lot to take in? Should he tell John that it's really quite simple, and there's not much anyone can do and could he just please get out of here?
"I'll go see about that ward bed," John says, " We'll talk more but right now I'll bet you just want to get out of here," he says reassuringly, and then disappears behind the curtains, which are left swinging slightly by his hasty departure.
The other doctor has scuttered away somewhere, too. Good riddance.
"Fine," Sherlock snarks after him, with the same put-upon voice he uses when John manages to bend him to his will over takeaway choices. He sounds like he's making a concession out of the goodness of his heart.
John's footsteps disappear down the hallway, the rubber soles squeaking slightly on the linoleum.
Aren't doctors supposed to ask if you have questions? John hadn't. He had obviously assumed Sherlock was quite content after hoovering into his head hundreds of virtual pages' worth of online data.
There's a baby crying somewhere with a high-pitched wail that feels like Sherlock's eardrums are being skewered with cocktail sticks. He fights the impulse to cover his ears.
He rearranges the pillow, which rustles in an irritating manner since it's covered with a plastic bag, with a starchy pillowcase on top. The texture of it is disgusting - too much poly and no cotton, wrapped up in crinkly plastic.
Must everything in this wretched place be designed to drive him crazy with maximum effectiveness?
He reads seven more articles about Guillain-Barré on his phone while waiting for John to return. The more he reads, the more it feels like the syndrome has nothing to do with him.
It's just semantics. The whole ICD-10 medical diagnostics system used in the Western world is a committee-formulated pile of agreements over which dead bearded men get to be honoured as the titular characters of which random clusters of symptoms. It's just an arbitrary agreement between physicians - a game of statistics, of averages. Never in his life has Sherlock been a poster boy for average. Every disease has as many forms as they have sufferers. Averages and most common forms might not apply to him at all.
This might not be Guillain-Barré at all. It could be something they haven't properly named or diagnosed yet. A novel disease. They could have misinterpreted his results. He should probably make that request for a printout of them after all. There's surely been a mistake. This can't be him.
He makes some more online searches with the same keywords again and again. Why he'd expect different results, he has no idea.
There's a video he stumbles upon. It's one of those pathetic inspirational ones self-made by survivors of whatever illness is the current buzzword of all the charities. In Sherlock's experience, all such videos seem to feature fonts imitating handwriting and pan flute music.
This one is by a Scottish woman named Jeannie who'd had Guillain-Barré.
He watches the video with detachment. That's someone else. Someone else's problem. Someone else's disease.
Part of the video had been shot at an intensive treatment unit. The woman lies there, face expressionless. Eyes vacant but filled with tears. Limbs like moulding clay, a rag doll at the mercy of others.
That's someone else. Not him.
Not him.
The ambulance John had called had been unnecessary. Completely unnecessary. He's not bloody invalided. He had been fine this morning.
He slowly flips the phone around with his palms. The video is still playing, the phone screen faintly illuminating the sheet covering his leg. He wants to fling the phone away, suddenly disturbed by the fact that the video is still there, that it still exists in the same space as him. As though it might be contagious somehow.
His hands are shaking slightly, and it isn't from cold. He decides to make a survey of himself again. Every time he checks, things seem to have become worse.
Tingling and static electricity -like sensations are reaching above his elbows now. A dull backache plagues him constantly, but he relishes that pain, because at least it means there are still some nerves actually transmitting information instead of shutting down. His limbs feel as though they're floating due to the lack of feeling.
John is right. He shouldn't have demanded information at a point where there's clearly only a working diagnosis. With time, the neurologists will find what's really wrong with him, and fix it. There's no need to discuss this ridiculous Guillain-Barré theory of John's any further. He'd heard the radiologist tell John that the MRI of his back had shown, quote 'inflamed lower lumbar spinal nerve roots'. He hadn't found that mentioned in the Guillain-Barré articles. Clearly something that doesn't fit, something that overrules this running gag of a diagnosis. John is a war surgeon, not a peacetime neurologist.
Sherlock manages to press the phone's power button. It takes him several tries. He abandons the phone on the blanket.
Within minutes, John returns.
Sherlock wastes no time in addressing this obvious problem they have with the misdiagnosis. "Have they ruled out West Nile infection? Botulinum toxin? Myasthenia gravis?" he interrogates frantically, eyes narrowed to slits. If there's something these idiots - or John - have missed, he's going to find it and then tear them to fucking pieces for being so clueless. Well, perhaps not John.
This is not him. It's not him confined to this bloody bed. It can't be.
"It's not botulism - that one wouldn't have surprised me to be honest, there's no telling what's brewing in those plastic containers at the back of the fridge. Botulism is descending, not ascending weakness," John explains. "It'll be okay," John then adds without addressing any of his other sensible differential diagnosis suggestions.
John then slumps down on a chair next to the bed. "Jesus. What a fucking night," he says and presses the heels of his palms on his closed eyelids.
Sherlock's first impulse is to point out that John has hardly borne the brunt of it, but something stalls his tongue.
John gently grabs Sherlock's coat, bundles it tightly and places it at the foot of the trolley. Sherlock watches him, feeling deflated and absent-minded. There are words that hang heavy in his head, such as what John claims is his diagnosis now, but suddenly he doesn't feel like grabbing hold of them and forcing them out.
"It's going to be fine," John says again as though it's a spell, looking like someone who'd run a marathon and come last. His voice is soft and instead of it irritating the hell out of Sherlock like it should, it now makes Sherlock feel utterly defeated. Is this something John always says to sick people, no matter how dire the situation because he actually believes in it? 'Your head's dropped off your shoulders but don't worry, it'll be fine?
Sherlock would be tempted to believe him, at least a little, if only he hadn't read all those articles.
"They're going to move you to the general neurology ward," John says.
"I'm going home," Sherlock replies.
"No, you're not. If you read all that stuff you must know this could progress quickly. You need to be somewhere with proper monitoring."
Sherlock isn't really listening. Couldn't he just walk out and forget about this? He does it all the time, sidestepping what others try to force-feed to him as the truth. He's good at bending people and events into his will, finding alternate solutions, making square pegs fit into round holes. He could solve this. "I will tell you if it gets bad. You can monitor the progress at home. Come on," he tells John and attempts to get off the bed.
In his mind, he's already on his feet by the bed, reaching for his coat. In reality his legs, which six hours earlier had still managed to transport him from the taxi to the downstairs foyer at home, now won't move at all.
He hasn't moved an inch off the bed.
His. Legs. Won't. Move.
And, as it turns out, he doesn't even have enough strength in his grip to shift either of his thighs to the edge of the bed by hand.
John watches him struggle without a word, staying back, letting him battle with his own limbs. Their eyes meet when Sherlock finally gives up and meets John's eyes.
There's a warning in John's gaze which Sherlock ignores.
Sherlock's head is a beehive of random facts: pathogenesis, symptoms, diagnostics, prognosis, treatment. None of it is useful. None of it is telling him what to do. His legs feel like they have been cut off at the joints, as though someone had left dismembered bits of dead people in his bed.
"This is bullshit," John says and that really does cover it. He moves to sit down on edge of the trolley again. He halts Sherlock futile efforts of flinging himself off the trolley by grabbing his wrist. Sherlock shakes off his grip.
"I'm sorry it had to be this. I haven't called Mycroft. I thought you'd want a moment," John offers gingerly.
Sherlock meets his gaze, frowning in bewilderment. A moment for what? Is there a reaction he's supposed to be having now? Something normal: cry, scream, pound the wall? Shake his fist at the uncaring universe?
Mostly he just feels like he has walked onto the wrong stage.
John is looking at him curiously with his kind blue eyes.
Maybe this is happening, after all.
There's a slight chance this is, in fact, happening. That John's theory might have some merit.
He can't rule out the possibility. And John seems convinced that the mystery is solved, which is pointless, absolutely pointless, because John can't stop this.
An uncomfortable bed at some ward isn't going to stop this.
His immune system is decimating his nervous system. There's a civil war raging inside him.
The diagnosis in itself is useless. True enough, he now has data, but he doesn't have answers. Not to the important questions, at least.
How long will this last?
Why now? Was it that stupid Winter flu? Or the atypical pneumonia that came after it that triggered this? Could it have been prevented?
What will it be like?
Will it hurt, and how much?
How do we do this?
How do I do this?
