Cuddy considered and produced a bill apparently from thin air. House kicked himself for having blinked when she reached into the top of her little black dress. "Give me fifty on Chase. I've seen him play poker, he counts cards."
The look of surprise on House's face was almost worth the lapse in ethics.
On the way to the lab, Chase tried to play the boyfriend card.
"Cameron, if you were in danger of infection from a patient, I would tell you, game or no game. This is important. What do you think he has?"
Cameron, unintimidated by her five inch deficit, looked up at him and smiled one of her sweet smiles that made his stomach flip over. "Nice try. But if I have to call the CDC I promise to tell you first. Well, maybe after Cuddy." She left him there, disgruntled, to shove his hands in his pockets and walk back to the conference room to indulge in a few minutes of sulking before considering what very little he knew.
Over at Callahan's house, Foreman was managing to fill in a few gaps in his own knowledge of the patient. No one moves through life without collecting things – bills, memories, trinkets, habits. House collected information, Wilson collected people. Cameron collected – what? He'd bet it was photographs. Chase collected awkwardly patterned shirts and emotional bruises from his unreachable father figures. Foreman didn't stop to consider what he himself had accumulated, but it would have been walls, adding layers to his armor as he moved from one sphere to the next, always looking to shuck one more piece of his old life as a poor black kid. Good fences make good neighbors.
Mr. Callahan, apparently, collected an unreasonable amount of paper. Perhaps not so unusual, for a man who would rely more than most on the written word, but he had bulletin boards littered with calendar pages, several tables covered with budget proposals and blueprints, and, in his bedroom, a printer tray with a confirmation for a plane ticket to somewhere in Southeast Asia.
Foreman deduced most of what Cameron had already learned, and in much less time. The man worked for some organization that built schools in underprivileged areas. Of course, in the third world, 'underprivileged' was par for the course, so Foreman knew his patient was working in the places most of the world would consider truly shocking. That gave him any number of parasitic disorders – and, judging from the framed photograph of a visibly healthier Callahan hugging a thin brown child, several African and Asian hemorrhagic disorders. I'll bet that's what Cameron's testing for, ebola, Crimeo-Congo, hanta virus. If she doesn't call the CDC I can rule those out. If she does, we've got bigger problems.
With roughly the same information now as Cameron – that is, where their patient had recently visited – it seemed fairly obvious the man had some sort of tropical disease, probably insect or water-borne. Let Cam cover the hemorrhagics, I'll work on the parasitic ones. Both types of disease fell more into the immunologist's realm of expertise, but Foreman did appreciate the ritual of testing.
Satisfied with his findings and fairly pleased with himself, Foreman retreated to the hospital to narrow down his possibilities with a lumbar puncture and an MRI, conserving his remaining test for what he might later find.
With Cameron running blood cultures, Foreman working on his spinal tap, and House holed up in Wilson's office taking money from the nurses on which of them would win, Chase was at the disadvantage of lacking patient history. However, as Cuddy had observed, when he played real poker he counted cards, which in most circles was considered cheating, and he didn't see any reason not to play similarly now.
Now, however, instead of reading the other players, he was reading their web histories: namely, Cameron's most recent internet searches. The last four or five were all diseases and climate conditions of Burkina Faso, Malaysia, and the Sudan, and something which had given her a stack of stingray images. Aussies knew their water creatures like they knew their water sports – no, not stingrays, he saw, looking closer, mantas. Unrelated to the case, he sighed, she had searched briefly and efficiently. At least the others gave him a ballpark history – the man traveled, and to places a badly informed or incautious tourist could pick up absolutely anything.
If it were an ordinary disease, the other hospital would have caught it, so it was safe to assume whatever it was would be rarely seen in North America, and possibly rarely seen even in the country from whence it came. So, diseases causing meningitis symptoms and jaundice from various obscure places in Asia and Africa? An iffy incubation time too; he didn't know how recently Callahan had been abroad, but most illnesses that serious didn't take long to present. He began making lists.
Cameron, her blood cultures for all major hemorrhagic fevers negative, was both relieved and back at square one. Well, it would have been interesting to have a case of hanta virus or something, at least that wasn't contagious….But it was also pretty fatal, she reminded herself. Back to the patient.
The patient, at that moment, was struggling against Foreman's attempts to sedate him. Mr. Callahan was now delirious, his fever rapidly approaching brain damage levels. His shouts had an ill-defined quality, but his hands were painfully expressive, tracing silent symphonies no other musician understood.
"Does he have to wave his hands around like that? Where's that damn interpreter, anyway?" Chase, walking in to find them now both trying to hold a limb still enough to sedate, was unsettled by the stunted sound of Callahan's voice, the sight of his frantic fingers, and the knowledge that he didn't know whether his patient was jolly with fever or screaming in pain. Foreman shrugged.
"Police department borrowed her, apparently law enforcement trumps hospitals."
"He can't help it, Chase, if he were just talking–"
"Then we'd sedate him, keep him quiet til we figured out what's wrong with him." Chase cut off Cameron's objection and ducked his head to avoid the reproach in his girlfriend's eyes.
"We're trying! You could help, you gotta outweigh Cameron by a couple pounds at least!" Foreman retorted. Chase obliged; Callahan wasn't big, but he was stronger by far than the hundred-pound immunologist.
Cameron backed off to glare at Foreman, who was giving her a blank, unimpressed look. Sorry sweetie, truth hurts.
"Uh, you guys?" Chase interrupted before Cameron could put her withering expression into words. They both looked his way; still struggling to get a grip on an arm, the intensivist was staring wide-eyed at the man on the bed. Following his gaze they saw Mr. Callahan, speaking too fuzzily to be comprehensible, clawing at his ears and thrashing his head from side to side as if to dislodge something agonizing.
"I think he's hearing something!" Chase looked back at them in alarm.
AN: I am very grateful to those who reviewed, especially my double-reviewer; it tells me if people are reading. Next update in two or three days.