"You're going to have to be more careful about getting sick," John noted the next morning over breakfast. He was eating toast and Sherlock was examining a soil sample under his microscope. "No more mould experiments."
Sherlock rolled his eyes around the microscope. "John, when was the last time I did a mould experiment- on purpose," he continued, as John opened his mouth to protest.
John closed his mouth, then opened it again, in an excellent imitation of a fish.
"I actually can't remember," he admitted. "A year?"
"Pretty much," Sherlock agreed. "The rest were... accidents."
"Bread under your bed is hardly an accident," John muttered.
Sherlock glared at him. "I've already apologized for that. What more do you want?"
John sighed, but didn't say anything.
John quickly memorized statistics. He may not have studied infectious disease in depth in medical school, but that didn't mean the numbers weren't burned into his brain. Lab values, timelines, statistics, rates of infection, medications, side effects. The information quickly moved from quantitative to qualitative. Less focus on days, more focus on how those days were spent. Quality of life, pain, emotional and otherwise.
Because even though the numbers were the ones that stuck, it was the things you couldn't count that kept cycling through John's brain night after night.
He wondered how Sherlock dealt with it.
"They have their own room in my mind palace," he told John when he worked up the courage to ask about it. "And they know by now not to come out."
John examined Sherlock's expression.
John didn't ask how that worked, but he wondered.