Thanks for the reviews, readers! I do play fair. I clearly indicated right back at the crash scene chapter that House didn't remember all of it, and there have been clues to every one of his list of symptoms since.
I don't come up with ideas, my muse does, so I'm sometimes not entirely sure where a story seed came from, but I think this one probably in part was inspired not only by the awful end of S5 which I wanted to redo (have trouble believing there weren't SOME physical injury contributions to those hallucinations, whether DBS or bike wreck or both), but also by the wonderful scene on the bus with Amber and House at the end of Wilson's Heart. House, keep in mind, had a discussion with Cuddy during You Raise Me Up in which he told her about his hallucination of Amber while he was in a coma. Remember that. Eventually, Cuddy will.
Enjoy 28.
(H/C)
Wilson was in deep and sympathetic conference with the family. "We'll keep her as comfortable as we can on morphine this evening, but all other measures will be withdrawn. I realize this is a difficult decision, but I appreciate your courage in making it."
The son nodded. "She's fought so hard - but she's just tired now. And it wouldn't be much longer, would it? Even if she hadn't had complications this afternoon?"
"I'm afraid not. Another month, tops. I'm sure she would appreciate you honoring her wishes." The oncologist's warm, brown eyes were sympathetic.
"Thank you so much, Dr. Wilson. She thinks a lot of you." He hesitated slightly on the word thinks, and Wilson saw the hard realization in his eyes that in just a few hours, he would be referring to his mother in the past tense. Even with a long and drawn-out illness so that eventual death was expected, it was hard to be brought face to face with the fact that eventually has become now, that this truly was it.
The daughter-in-law suddenly caught her breath in a sob, and the son hugged her, blinking his own brimming eyes.
"I'll be around in the hospital the rest of the evening," Wilson stated. "If you need anything at all, please, let me know."
Right then, his phone chirped with a text message, and Wilson pulled it out with an apologetic expression and looked down at the screen.
His gaze froze. The son and daughter-in-law looked at each other, momentarily distracted from their own imminent grief by the shocked horror in his eyes. "Dr. Wilson? Is something wrong?"
Wilson shoved the cell phone back into his pocket. "Sorry, got to go. Emergency with another patient. I'll check back in later." All that was called over his shoulder; he was already gone around the corner by the time they could reply.
The stairs had never seemed so long. His mind seemed to be running even faster than his legs, repeating the last few days, remembering how pale and ill - not just tired, but ill - House had looked today. Why on earth hadn't he seen that something truly was wrong? House shouldn't have to diagnose himself after an accident that had done so much damage to others. Wilson should have insisted on a full workup in the ER.
He heard Cuddy's shriek as he exited the stairwell onto her floor, and the sound lent extra wings to his feet. Rachel was tuning up now, starting to cry, but Cuddy's repeated calls for help were just as loud around it. Everybody nearby who wasn't involved with something urgent dropped their current task and ran.
A nurse was first into the room, with Wilson a short head behind. House was on the floor beside the bed in the middle of a grand mal seizure, and Cuddy, with a terrified Rachel in her arms, was held to the bed only by her daughter's presence, not by her injuries. Wilson had no doubt that if not for fear of dropping Rachel, she would have already been on the floor next to House, stitches and all.
"Get me some Ativan stat!" Wilson shouted as he sprinted across the room. The nurse had already rolled House over, trying to cradle his head and keep him from hitting it on either the bedside table or the wheels of the bed, both of which were dangerously close. Wilson tried to help hold him, and then an aide was bending over all of them, injecting the Ativan. Slowly the convulsions stopped.
Rachel showed no signs of stopping. She was screaming at the top of her lungs, her wide eyes fixed in horror on her dad. "Get her out of here! Take her back down to Pediatrics," Wilson ordered. He quickly checked House's carotid pulse and frowned. Too weak, too fast, and not totally even.
An aide extricated Rachel from Cuddy and left the room, the crying audible clear down the hall as if the volume knob were being gradually turned down. In the next second, two nurses had hold of Cuddy, who had attempted to get up the instant her daughter was pulled free. Cuddy fought them like a wildcat, desperate to get down and check on House herself, desperate to do something. The fresh major surgery was forgotten, the fever weakness from today forgotten. "Dr. Cuddy, you can't get up," an aide insisted. "You'll rip your stitches! You aren't strong enough."
"Do something, damn it!" Cuddy pushed back against the confining hands. "Let go of me."
The second syringe of Ativan in as many minutes made a rapid appearance in the room, and Cuddy was still struggling as the drug claimed her. She fell backwards into unconsciousness, defeated.
Wilson and the first nurse, ignoring the tableau being played out above them, had straightened House out on the floor. Airway, breathing, and circulation all present, although none of his numbers looked good. He was sweating, and his skin was clammy. He also had finished the progressive journey over the last two days to looking just as pale as his wife. Wilson pulled up an eyelid to flash the penlight, and his stomach twisted. If he had had time for it, he thought he might have actually vomited on the spot. He quickly compared with the other pupil. Still never taking his eyes off House, he called, "We need a gurney stat. MRI, and I don't care who you have to bump to get him in. Page Neurosurgery, have OR ready." House obviously had an acute brain injury, almost certainly a bleed judging from the look of things, but they had to know the exact location and details before opening the skull. Wilson spread his fingers and ran them through the graying chestnut hair, finding the bump and exploring it.
The gurney was jogged in by a team of staff, and they quickly lifted House onto it. That quickly, he was gone from the room.
Wilson stood up and looked over at Cuddy. "Give her some more morphine," he ordered in a shaky tone. "Make sure she stays out until we have definite news; if she wakes up before House is out of surgery, she'll be trying to get up again."
"I will, Dr. Wilson."
Wilson walked out of the room, hearing the floor almost echo with the remembered screams of a few minutes ago. Near silence had rushed in oppressively to fill the vacuum. He walked with even professionalism as far as the door to the stairwell, but once through it, he slumped and buried his face against the wall, feeling hot tears well up. "Please, God, don't let this be happening. How much more can he take?"
If God knew, he didn't answer. After a few minutes, Wilson forced his shaky legs to resume motion, and he headed down to the MRI room.
(H/C)
Jensen had made excellent time from Middletown. He entered PPTH with smooth speed and found room 338, but Cuddy alone was there. She was deeply asleep, artificially deeply asleep, although judging from the monitors, she was stable, with only a low-grade fever remaining. Jensen pulled out his cell phone and called House's, but it went to voicemail. After a moment's hesitation, he called Wilson's cell instead.
It rang five times before the oncologist picked up. "Hello." His tone was tight and strained.
"James? I'm down in Dr. Cuddy's room."
"You're here?"
"Yes. Dr. House called me a little over two hours ago and asked that I come down, but he's not in Dr. Cuddy's room where he said he would be. Do you know where he is?"
"He called you?"
"Yes. What's wrong, James?"
Wilson sighed. "I'm in the observation room of OR 6. Ask somebody to show you the way." Without farewell, the oncologist hung up.
The tide of concern rising, Jensen quickly asked a passing aide for directions. A few minutes later, he was entering the observation room. Wilson was the sole occupant, and he was sitting with shoulders slumped, looking absolutely defeated, casting hesitant glances at the monitor screen as if he were afraid to watch and more afraid to turn away. Jensen looked down into the room below, confirming his worst fear, then turned back to Wilson. "What happened?"
"Apparently, he damaged two vessels in his brain at the time of the accident. He's had a gradually progressing bleed since then over the last two days, building up pressure. An hour and a half ago, he collapsed in Cuddy's room and started seizing. MRI showed a significant hemorrhage. They've drained the blood; now they're doing microsurgery to repair the vessels." Wilson buried his face in his hands. "If anybody had thoroughly checked him out, if we'd done the MRI Thursday night, it would have been simple to fix. But nobody, not one person, gave him a complete evaluation for a head injury, when he had visible cuts on his face and had obviously hit something. Instead, for two days straight, I've been treating someone with an acute brain bleed by making absolutely sure he kept taking painkillers and anticoagulants and by trying to encourage him to sleep." He ground the heels of his palms against his eyes. "I can't believe I call myself a doctor."
Jensen himself was shocked. He pulled the next chair over a little closer to Wilson's and sat down. "This probably is medically relevant at this point. He's been having significant problems controlling his thoughts and memories since the crash. When he called me a few hours ago, he clearly thought he was on the edge of a complete breakdown, and I was afraid he was right. Obviously, the root problem was physical, not psychiatric."
Wilson nodded. "I'd noticed myself that he was very snappy today, irritable, but who wouldn't be? He's been dealing with multiple family members having complications, he had to talk to the police . . . it never occurred to me that there was a physical cause beyond being tired. But this morning. . ." Wilson shook his head. "I had an awful time waking him up. I know what he's like the morning after the zolpidem. That was not normal, not for nine hours later. He should have been recharged, and instead, it took me a few minutes to get any response at all. His speech wasn't clear at first. And I ignored it. Everybody else was crashing right then. He seemed functional once the adrenaline hit."
"It's not your fault," Jensen replied. "It sounds like there has been enough error to go around the hospital - you couldn't have been the only doctor who didn't get a complete exam on him. I dropped a clue myself, something he said once that implied that he did not completely remember the events of the accident. I questioned that, and he brushed it off, but I failed to follow up on the point, and I should have. But if this whole situation is anybody's fault, it's the drunk driver's."
Wilson nodded. "I know, but . . . I shouldn't have missed things. I should have been there."
Jensen looked over at him. "You're as bad as he is about trying to make the present a replay of the past. You thought this crisis was your chance to atone for leaving after Amber, didn't you?"
Wilson sighed and nodded after a moment. "Rip-roaring success that was."
Jensen considered following that up, then dropped it. This wasn't the time, not with House on the table below them in the middle of brain surgery. "What's the prognosis?" Jensen asked.
The oncologist shook his head. "There was a lot of pressure. There might be brain damage. We'll just have to wait and see."
Jensen flinched but didn't reply. After another few minutes, Wilson's lips twitched briefly in a bittersweet, humorless smile. "He knew what was wrong at the end, I think. He'd figured it out himself. He sent me an urgent page that he needed an MRI, and then he apparently handed Rachel to Cuddy right before he collapsed and started seizing. He had Rachel when I left, but Cuddy had her when he fell, not on the edge of the bed but directly on top of her, held tight. She's not strong enough to get her into that position right now and wouldn't have with the stitches anyway; he had to have put her there. He knew he was going down, but he knew by then he wasn't just falling apart."
Jensen was glad of it. He still remembered House's voice, tight and frightened, a couple of hours ago. At that point, he'd been convinced he was breaking down mentally. Jensen was glad that fear had been alleviated, maybe giving House a little bit better anchor to hold onto in the upcoming physical battle.
They sat quietly watching the surgery for a few minutes. House's vitals weren't entirely stable, and the OR team kept having to pause to adjust meds. After a little while, Wilson looked over at the psychiatrist. "You came down here for him."
"Of course, once he asked me to."
"I mean, it's obvious that his problems the last few days haven't been psychiatric after all. Are you going back to Middletown?"
Jensen shook his head. Not only was he deeply concerned about House, but he could tell that Wilson needed if not a psychiatrist at least a friend at the moment. The oncologist had been trying to be the strong one for two days, and he was mentally as well as physically worn out by it. "I'll stay for the moment," he replied. "I'll get a hotel room in Princeton somewhere. I'll be around."
Wilson gave a sigh of release. He still felt guilty, but he felt a little less alone. "Thank you."
"You're welcome," Jensen replied. He looked up at the monitor. "He means a lot to me by now. You both do."
Wilson glanced away from the monitor, then back. House's brain, that incredibly genius brain, undergoing operation on the table below. "He means a lot to all of us."
He only hoped he'd get a chance to tell House that in the future and to receive an impatient shoulder twitch and an eye roll in response.
