MINUO
House stared at the patient from where he stood at the door. He was hoping to make it snappy, being close to the door made for a quick getaway. The patient, an older man who looked relatively fit, sat on the chair by the bed, a spiral notebook sitting on the bed itself. He rolled his left shoulder up and winced. 'It hurts when I do this,' he said.
My god, thought House, it was one of those. He sighed, taking a pill from his pocket and downing it.
'Does it hurt when I do this?' House asked, proceeding to whack the man's hand smartly with is all-purpose cane.
'Ow! Yes!' the man cried, jerking his hand away with a satisfying amount of outrage.
'Excellent. Think about that while I look at your hand.' The patient reluctantly started to offer the wounded hand, but House ignored it and took the other one, looking it over briefly. 'Are you playing or observing?'
The patient looked blankly at him.
'The public tennis couples tournament. The pamphlet's coming out of your notebook.'
'Oh... me and my wife are playing.'
House released the patient's hand. 'Firstly, that would be 'my wife and I', and secondly I assume you're taking your arthritis medication.'
'Arthritis...? What-?'
House explained in a dull tone as he stood in the doorway again. 'The pain was in your shoulder, so it was likely muscle or joint, and at your age, the latter's far more likely since you seem like the kind of man to jump around in pretty white shoes and pom-pom socks with healthy frequency. Muscle strain's ruled out; you moved your right arm with fantastic speed when my realization hit you. You're right-handed when you play tennis, aren't you?'
'Yeah-'
House snatched the prescription book from the shelf and started scribbling in it. 'Then arthritis it is. The joints on your left hand are starting to show symptoms. Take aspirin in these intervals and you're good to go for the tournament.' He flicked the paper into the patient's lap, and left the room. Outside there was only another forty minutes worth of patients, if addressed properly. Patients, patience... he really wanted to get his hands on whoever thought those two words should be in any way alike.
And his patience wouldn't last a full forty minutes with that headache.
Wilson looked up from where he was seated when a hassled-looking House exited the examination room. The hassled-looking patient left shortly after, making a b-line for the front door, eying House and clutching a prescription note. 'Always better when it's mutual.' He mused with a smile while watching discreetly for signs of House's former, slightly off mood.
House acknowledged Wilson with only scoff and turned towards the chairs of waiting people. 'You. What's wrong with you?' He said to the woman sitting closest to the examination room he was in. A pretty middle-aged brunette with her eyes closed and her head leaned back. She blinked and looked up at him.
'I... I'm sorry?' She spoke slowly with a moderately thick accent. Spanish, possibly. Interesting...
'I asked what was wrong with you in a rushed and aggravated manner. That's a hint there, so quick!'
'Sir, aren't you a patient?' She asked, beginning to get that generic, harassed look that anyone who was present when House opened his mouth had.
'I'm only disguising myself as a patient to perform a secret quality census. Bedside manner is totally the new black, and I moonlight as a culture expert. Can you tell?' He trailed off as he was met with her confusion. 'Excellent, language barrier! What's wrong with you?'
'I am dizzy...' She explained quietly, understanding enough to reply, but understanding through tone that there was no chance she could win anything with him.
Wilson himself wouldn't venture to be much else but kind to his patients. First of all, a number of them were dying, and it was hard not to be nice to someone dying of something that couldn't be helped. At least, to anyone with a conscience it would be hard. Even House put his debatable charms aside when dealing with a serious case. What he did with the others may as well have been negligible. It exasperated the patients, Cuddy and the rest of his team to no end, but his anti-tact was what made him such an excellent doctor.
'"Dee-zee"? I'll bet your travel handbook had emergency medical phrases.' He indicated the book in her lap. 'Where are you from?'
She didn't look at him and mumbled, 'Cadiz.'
'Ooh, very nice. Still a drive from being Mediterranean, but that's beside the point. The point is, this is about two thousand feet higher than your home. Sparser oxygen can be bothersome.'
House sighed as he received another dull look which flagging off the realm of her knowledge of the language. 'No es nada, enjoy your vacation.' He waved her away and moved on as she scurried off. Under a minute. Making good time.
The next was a young couple. He was about to demand to know what the problem was when it presented itself:
Hic.
'So that's your line is it?'
'She's had them for weeks... we tried water, we tried scaring her, we tried making her hold her breath, and she even held it for a whole minute, but nothing's helped.' The young man looked slightly frantic as he pushed his glasses further up his narrow nose.
'Did you try scaring her?'
'Well... yes, I said we did...'
'But you scared her by jumping out of a box or something, right?'
'Closet, actually.'
'Well then...' House leaned in to the girl who hicced nervously, and he put on his best serious face. 'There was only one other case of serious hiccoughs on record at this hospital. Again, family members and friends tried everything, and like you, it was in vain. They brought her here to me, too, and after trying some things we had to move on to drastic measures...'
Fighting to hold back his laughter, Wilson hid behind a home and garden magazine. He knew exactly where this was going. It was clever, too. The pair of them thought it up one afternoon over lunch during one of their Outrageous Cures club sessions. The club had only ever consisted of exactly two people, but it became a bounty of obscure quips and quirks that actually worked. Hiccoughs... stimulating the sympathetic nervous system could cure them, so startling people worked sometimes. Scaring someone over a longer period of time tended to work better though...
The couple looked at House uncertainly, the girl hicced again. 'Hiccoughs are caused by spasms of a thin little muscle called the diaphragm. So naturally, the best way to stop them is to prevent the diaphragm from moving, right? Well, unfortunately we also kinda need it to breathe. Here's what we did... in a painful complicated surgical method called the Vogler method we cut her open and put little hooks into her diaphragm to hold it in place, and hooked her right on up to the heart-lung machine so she wouldn't have to breathe at all. Sadly, she didn't make it, but on the bright side, she didn't have the hiccoughs anymore. We're willing to try again, though.'
'That's totally bogus...' The guy hazarded, his face white.
'Wanna give it a try?' House asked cheerfully.
'What are you doing this time?' Came Cuddy's unimpressed voice from behind him.
'Treating patients?'
'Treating them like infants... and telling them wild fourth-grade horror-stories?'
House looked at the girl carefully. Silence. 'Yep. Case solved. Well done, Cuddy. It's a good thing you came along, your presence has done it again. I don't praise you nearly enough.'
And there it was, the cure to hiccoughs. The topic had come around in one of the briefer Outrageous Cures sessions, and making a horror story about the ailment itself seemed a perfect touch for scaring a patient enough to cure them. Vogler was a nice touch, too, though the girl wasn't able to appreciate the reference, and the name's connection to pain and complexity. In no hurry, Wilson set aside the magazine and trailed several paces behind House and Cuddy, hands in his pockets, enjoying the banter without being the victim of it.
'Who taught you that one, one of the hypochondriacs?' She moaned once they were out of earshot.
'I run on pure inspiration, in the form of cookies.'
'And Vicodin.' Cuddy suggested off-handedly. 'But you're rushing through patients again. It's not the number of patients, House, it's the number of hours.'
'I tried doing nothing in the clinic, but you won't let me.'
'And you'd let that stop you?' Wilson chimed from behind.
House continued, seeming not to have heard him. 'If there were no patients, then I could do nothing in the clinic. For as long as there were no patients. You see the logic in that? Everyone's cured, everyone wins.'
'House, your nose is bleeding.'
'What kind of a comeback is that?'
'It really is.' Cuddy sighed. 'Go see.'
Tentatively, yet still with nonchalance, he touched a hand to his nose and saw it come away tipped with red. 'Ha.' He said, sounding almost triumphant as he turned towards the clinic washroom, and paused in the doorway. 'Unfortunately, as much as I would love to finish clinic duty, no one would be able to take me seriously if I had Kleenex sticking out of my nose.' He disappeared into the washroom.
'I wager he's in there until the clinic wins a separatist motion.'
'Why are you still here?' Cuddy slumped, defeated for the moment.
Wilson was tempted to say because he was worried, but it wasn't anything strong enough to warrant voicing.
So he fell back onto House's own cover story. 'I felt the need to frighten people in the smoking pit. I need House to act as my effigy.'
'If you're actually doing this to annoy him, just tell me outright. Endeavors like that deserve flowers.'
With a smile and small shake of his head, Wilson entered the washroom leaving a cross Cuddy to her own devices. House was leaned over one of the sinks pinching his nose, his cane resting on the counter.
'That'd better not by Cuddy,' he said, head in the sink.
'She wasn't quite desperate enough to follow you into the men's washroom.' Wilson said, coming up to stand next to his friend. 'So what's with the nosebleed?'
'Dunno, but it's convenient, don't you think?'
'Not quite the word I'd have used. Have you gotten random nosebleeds before?' Wilson was plotting out exactly where he'd go with this.
'Jumping right into doctor mode. You really have had nothing to do all day, haven't you?' He straightened, pinching a paper towel on his nose which muted his voice amusingly. 'Random could mean any number of things. Air conditioning on a warm day dries out the air. Or I could have been picking my nose earlier, you never know.'
'I think you should get your blood pressure checked.' Wilson said rationally.
'Ah-ha. You're trying to convince me to take a vacation. Well, I figured out your ploy, so tough.'
Wilson leaned against the counter. Yeah, he'd been found out. It was hard to not be figured out by a man of House's intelligence. 'What exactly is wrong with taking a vacation? I've been wondering that for the last while, now.'
'That would be suggesting that I need it. Which I don't.'
'Stress, headaches, nosebleeds... your head's the only thing that doesn't want this. Come on, the vast majority of people who don't need vacations take them anyway. Long, paid vacations with girls and golf. What is it in particular that's keeping you here?'
House was quiet, and turned back to the sink. 'It's been dull enough. You should know better than anyone what that's like. Sitting in our offices, waiting for a patient, with nothing to do but watch TV, maybe play some games, or if that fails sit idly and think about cases that maybe could have been addressed differently. All of the above I can only do better at home.' He spoke plainly, and replaced his paper towel.
Well. That was a good point. Wilson's particular department hadn't been low-volume as long as House's, but he knew that during a dry spell he'd start looking back on other cases that might still be around to treat if things had gone differently. Death was always an issue for doctors, but contrary to popular belief it never got easier. Again, Wilson's sphere of duty was different in that there were always patients with poor outlooks, and there was nothing that could be done for them except make them comfortable, but the realm of diagnoses was touch-and-go. It was sometimes difficult to make the right diagnosis, and things went wrong if the patient's treated for something other than their affliction.
House had bitter firsthand experience of that. His own case was likely the one he mulled over the most. No one had caught it until the damage was done, and five years ago as House vehemently blamed the medley of doctors involved, he may have felt it was more his fault than anyone else's. He was supposed to be the professional, and he himself missed it too, and he had to pay the considerable price. There were other bad cases as well, with much sleep lost to solve, and people who may be eternally ungrateful; malpractice suits from people who wouldn't have been around to file a malpractice suit if it hadn't been House working on their case.
House made it seem easy, like it was all just in a day's work. By attitude, he seemed to respect hatred as an art form for he was certainly on the receiving end of it often enough. Maybe this was what Wilson 'sensed'. In fact, he was logically convinced that this was the case, and yet when he put the feeling and the explanation together, they didn't quite cancel out.
'Although I wouldn't complain if I was given two weeks off clinic duty. That's what... one sixty-eight... three hundred and thirty-six hours of General Hospital.'
'Or Cuddy could just take it out of your debt. That's about a year and a half, if you do four hours a week.'
'Exactly. If I did four hours a week. If I only did two, I wouldn't have to work in the clinic for three whole years.' There was a twinkle in his eye and he threw out the second paper towel, checking with the mirror above the sink to see if he needed more.
'At the very least, go get checked out. Just humor me.' Wilson said, looking at House in the mirror. He glanced back at him, poised for some other witty retort, but kept it to himself. Maybe he sensed something about Wilson, just as Wilson did him, and he merely nodded, taking up his cane.
'But you gotta keep Cuddy off my back while I sneak away.'
Wilson gave his assurance, and followed him out. He was glad House knew when to trust him. They'd certainly known each other long enough, he couldn't see why he wouldn't, but for his general mistrust of humanity. He'd certainly hide things, and was usually somewhat flustered when Wilson's intuition tracked it down, but quickly became aloof about it, throwing in some of his questionable wit to shake the oncologist's course. He could be reasonable when he felt the need, though the intervals of it were unpredictable.
House waved his goodbye to Cuddy upon exiting, and strolled off down the hall whistling slightly off-key.
'Wha- where is he go...' She turned on Wilson. 'Is he going back to the clinic? Of free will?'
Wilson glanced indicatively at the ground. 'Getting cold down there, do you think?'
Cuddy rolled her eyes some and turned to go after House.
'Uh, Dr. Cuddy.' Wilson called after her, thinking fast about what to say to stall her. He figured the whole clinic vacation thing would be enough, if bland, and filled her in on the details.
She laughed. 'Three hundred clinic hours? Tell me he's joking.'
'You could just take it off the end. Do you really want him here until 2054?'
'Why is he only corrupting you now? One would think he'd have gotten to you sooner.'
Wilson held up his hands a little. 'Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just relaying what he said.'
'Alright, alright, but now he's alone in the clinic. Maybe he should just get some time off from the clinic. It always seems like more effort for the rest of us when he's there.' She shook her head and stalked back to the clinic.
The latter half of the day certainly seemed to be more animated than the first. Wilson mused on House's disgust at being a patient, and probably figured the five minutes he had stalled Cuddy would be enough for him to get in and out of the examination room. Knowing him, he probably performed the exam himself. Upon entering the clinic, he wasn't yet back out harassing patients.
Cuddy strode right up to the reception desk. 'Is Dr. House with a patient?' She asked impatiently.
'Not exactly...' The receptionist began...