Part 4
At first Chase didn't even recognize that life had begun making him lemonade instead of tossing the usual sour lemons at him. He was simply too busy. House had come back rather chipper from his trip—either he'd cleaned up at poker or the hookers in Vegas were better than those in Princeton—and enough interesting cases appeared to keep the department hopping. But, eventually, he couldn't help but notice the little odd bouts of good fortune that kept winging his way. The closet door in his apartment that always jammed before closing properly, now shut without a problem. The leaky faucet that two plumbers couldn't fix mysteriously stopped one night after he'd mentally begged it to do so, and had never resumed its steady beat.
"Maybe Lady Luck followed you home from Atlantic City," he told his reflection as he shaved—right before he nicked himself with the blade. Or not.
One…two…three…breathe.
One…two…three…breathe.
One…two…pause…flip…one…two…breathe.
Like all the other doctors at Princeton-Plainsboro, Robert Chase had been offered a discounted recreational membership at Princeton University as a perk of employment at the hospital (and how Cuddy had snagged that privilege nobody knew). Unlike most of the other doctors, he actually took advantage of the deal; if he occasionally spotted a resident in the gym, he'd never seen another physician at the pool. Yet as swimming laps had always been his preferred form of exercise, he certainly hadn't been about to decline ready access to a pool. Besides, the place was usually deserted when it opened—only serious ducks hit the water at 7am in the morning—and Chase liked the quiet. Barring unforeseen patient crises or House issues, he religiously did 100 laps (60 freestyle, 40 backstroke) at least three mornings each week. He'd become so familiar to the sports staff that they'd started calling him "Doc," though a few still had trouble believing he wasn't a grad student.
One…two…three…breathe.
One…two…three…breathe.
One…two…pause…flip…one…two…breathe.
With most students and faculty on summer break, Chase glided through the otherwise empty pool with the easy familiarity of a veteran swimmer, settling into a pattern as familiar to him as any cardiac rhythm. It had taken him only a few weeks to time his morning routine so that he arrived 5 minutes early at the office.
One…two…three…breathe.
One…two…three…breathe.
One…two…flip…one…two…breathe.
He was almost done with his laps when his brain began to wander, running through his schedule for the day. He had clinic duty that morning, which at least meant a respite from House, who'd been driving him to distraction—or more than usual anyway—since his concussion. With luck, the department would get an interesting enough case to ensnare his boss's attention.
He'd finished up and had just emerged from the pool, when Dylan, the lifeguard on duty called out, "Finally stopped popping your head towards the end there, Doc."
"Sorry?" Chase asked as he stretched a bit, now desperate for a shower and caffeine.
"You weren't hitting the brakes before your turns," the lifeguard clarified, clearly amused as he mimed what he was talking about. "Head not popping."
And that, Chase thought, couldn't have been right. He'd known exactly when he was about to hit the wall. Known it to the nth degree with the surety he associated with visual confirmation. And he always got visual confirmation. He'd never been able to resist lifting his head to spot the wall before a turn, no matter how well he knew his location in the water. There was always that momentary slowdown, the fear of a crash. The one time he'd actually given the matter any thought, after coming up just short of a win during a race back in secondary school, he'd decided it was prudence. But deep down he knew it was fear. Fear always came before faith in his experience.
"Shaved more than 3 minutes off your time, too," Dylan added, pointing to the clock on the wall above the pool.
Surprised, Chase checked the clock and was amazed to find that he had indeed done his laps faster than he had since…well, since he could ever remember. He shook his head and chalked it up to chance and long stretches in the pool. He must have become more comfortable in his surroundings than he thought.
"Must be all that coaching from the sidelines," Chase joked as he toweled off and Dylan laughed. The early morning hours were conducive only to a few words of small talk and not much more. In truth, Chase knew that once the lifeguard had verified he knew what he was doing in a pool, the junior often spent the morning studying, only spot-checking the pool long enough to learn his swimmers' habits and keep an eye on things.
"Have a good day, Doc," Dylan told him from his perch above the pool before putting his nose back into what looked to be an anthropology textbook.
"You too, mate," Chase replied with a smile before heading off to the locker room, mentally allowing himself two extra minutes in the shower as a reward for the early finish.
Chase walked out of Exam Room 2, once again astonished by the level of creativity human beings used in devising new ways to damage themselves. He'd just made it over the threshold, when Karen Wechsler, one of the clinic's nurses, thrust yet another file into his hand. The clinic had been hopping since he'd arrived that morning and there didn't seem to be an end in sight.
"Please tell me this is bronchitis."
"Baseball."
"Swallowed one?" He didn't think that possible, but he'd already pulled a fork out of someone's esophagus that morning, so one never knew. He was actually hoping for something a bit more normal.
"Hit by a ball. Nice kid. Mom's a worrywart. Exam 1."
Chase smiled—anxious mothers didn't bother him in the least—as he handed Wechsler the file for the patient he'd just seen and watched her walk off. He took a quick look at the chart he'd been given, then walked into Examination Room 1, where, sure enough, a woman and a boy who clearly resembled her were waiting for him.
"Good morning Mrs. Pasquarello, I'm Dr. Chase," he said, nodding to the woman before shutting the door and turning his attention to the boy on the exam table. "Domingo—right?"
The boy sitting on the exam table nodded.
"Okay. Why don't you tell me what happened?"
"He got plunked with a baseball," the boy's mother piped up from behind him. "Yesterday!"
"Mom, it was a stupid wild pitch at practice, not even a game. Ricky wasn't even throwing at full speed. No big deal." Domingo Pasquarello, 10-year-old Little Leaguer, was obviously aggrieved at his mother's anxiety. And he didn't appear to be too enthusiastic that he was in the clinic in the first place.
"If it was no big deal, you wouldn't be breathing like your asthmatic grandmother and your chest wouldn't look like a post-modern painting."
"So you got hit by a baseball in the ribs?" Chase said, trying to establish some order. "And we're having a little trouble breathing?"
Domingo nodded.
"Hear anything crack or pop when you were hit?"
"Nope."
"Any dizziness or pressure in your chest?"
"Nope," Domingo told him, shaking his head. "Coach made me sit out the rest of practice though."
"Coach is a smart guy," Chase replied with a smile. "Ok, then. Let's have a look. Can you take your shirt off for me?"
"It really doesn't hurt too much." Domingo was clearly trying to sound convincing, but winced as he gingerly took off his shirt.
"You'll say anything to be able to play tomorrow," his worried mother countered as Chase studied the rather large amount of bruising spread across the right side of the boy's rib cage. "You didn't even tell me when you came home; I had to hear it from Freddy!"
Chase, whose only experience with baseball was via a weed-smoking Major Leaguer with cadmium poisoning, nevertheless could guess at the importance of the impending competition.
"Big game?" he asked with a smile as he started palpating Domingo's ribs.
"We're playing Ershow," the boy told him excitedly, as if that explanation was all that was needed, but then added, "we win, we take the division."
"Right," Chase replied with a nod as he got out his stethoscope. The child's ribs felt a little tender, though otherwise ok on palpation, but Chase couldn't shake the almost tangible sensation that something wasn't quite right. "Take a couple of deep breaths for me, but don't force it if you can't."
Domingo complied, his breathing somewhat rapid and shallow—but that was understandable. Chase wouldn't have been too eager to move damaged ribs either; as a child he'd once been hit by an errant bowler in a cricket match and he hadn't been too happy about breathing for the next week. Of course, that hadn't stopped him from playing the rest of the match. Domingo's lungs sounded ok, but a frowning Chase still sensed that something was moving where it shouldn't be.
"When you say it doesn't hurt too much—is the pain more like you feel sore, or is it sharp, like you hit yourself on something?
The boy considered that for a moment. "Mostly sore, I guess."
"Mostly?"
"It's a little worse every now and then, mostly when I breathe in," he admitted grudgingly.
"Well, it doesn't feel as if anything's broken," he told Domingo slowly, before turning to face Mrs. Pasquarello. "But given the amount of edema—that's the swelling you're seeing around his ribs—and the discomfort, I'm going to order some chest x-rays."
"Is there something wrong?" she asked anxiously, noticing his expression.
"No reason to get alarmed," Chase immediately reassured her. "It could just be standard bruising, or it might be a cracked rib. I think it's better to be safe rather than sorry."
He'd learned his lesson the hard way with Kayla, a patient he'd lost the previous year after failing to diagnose her ulcer, and had no intention of screwing up again.
"I can still play tomorrow, though, right?"
"If you have a cracked rib, then I'm afraid you're going to have to cheer from the stands." The boy looked crushed, but his mother looked relieved at the pronouncement. "But let's wait for the x-rays to come back before making any decisions, ok?"
As he left his rather dejected patient to order the chest films, Chase couldn't help but hope that stupid feeling of his was wrong—even as he knew it wasn't.
"He's ten. Ten-year-olds can't sit still for five seconds—probably moved during the x-ray."
"It's not a shadow or an echo or whatever," Chase insisted. The radiologist's report for Domingo Pasquarello had come back marked "inconclusive," because of what looked like a smudge near the child's fifth rib. Chase had correctly interpreted that as "I don't have a clue, so I'm dumping the problem on you," and summoned the clinic's assigned orthopedist, Michael Riley, who wasn't being much help either.
"If it looks like a shadow, and he's not showing signs for anything else, then the odds are he either moved or the technician screwed up. You do what you want; I'd tell him to go play ball."
As Riley strode off, Chase looked up at the ceiling as if begging for divine intervention, though, as usual, none was forthcoming. He wasn't entirely sure why he was so positive that the other physicians were wrong, but no matter what they told him, Chase still felt something was rotten in his Little Leaguer.
Grabbing the x-rays off the light box, he headed back to the exam room where the Pasquarellos waited to inform them that Domingo would need a chest CT.
"Bone splinter?" The chest CT had provided a far clearer picture of Domingo Pasquarello's chest, and Chase's forebodings had been vindicated by a very small, but sharp looking object that clearly didn't belong where it was sitting.
"Looks like. Though the odds of that happening, and the splinter sitting right behind the rib are…insane." Riley, the orthopedist who'd summarily dismissed his concerns before, was now studying the CT films with extraordinary interest. "Kid should've played the lottery."
"Yeah, well he isn't going to be too happy to hear he won't be playing anymore baseball this summer."
"Better no baseball than a hole in his lung. That thing's probably been moving around in there and it's only a matter of time before it pokes where it shouldn't. He's lucky you're stubborn."
You mean you're lucky I'm stubborn, Chase thought, even as he felt relieved that they'd caught the problem before it had developed into something much worse.
"I'll schedule him for surgery," Riley announced, breaking into his reverie. "Kosov should be able to get him in this afternoon."
"I'll go break the news."
Domingo was predictably upset, but Mrs. Pasquarello, much to Chase's amusement, actually took the news that her son would need surgery quite well, seemingly relieved they'd actually found something wrong and that he wouldn't be playing ball the next day.
And so Chase was feeling rather upbeat when he signed out of the clinic. He'd barely made it out the door when he got a page from the hospital's records department. Puzzled, he called in, wondering what on earth they wanted with him; he was pretty sure he was caught up on all of his charts. Two minutes after getting on the phone with one of the records clerks, he felt as if he'd taken a fastball in the chest himself, moving from happy to livid in the space of seconds.
I'm going to kill him.
To be continued