"GUESSWORK"

Chapter Sixteen

"Oh Doctor, Doctor!"

"I have no idea when or how the man will get here," Bernoski told his office manager with a flip of his hands in the air and a clueless expression on his normally self-assured face. "… Other than that he told me he drives a Honda. Could be today … probably today … but it's not carved in stone. I'll be here no matter when he gets here. I didn't press him for details, Neeka. Sorry."

She looked up at him over glasses with bright red frames, perched low on her shiny, wide, chocolate-brown nose. "That doesn't do a thing for me when it comes to keeping y'awl's volunteer schedule straight," she stated petulantly. "I have his name in the computer, but nothing else. How old is he? Race? Nationality? Marital status? Next of kin? Religious preference? Nature of his medical problem? All I have is that he's from New Jersey, he's on his way here as we speak, and he'll be pulling up outside in a rice burner. I need more info than that, Kip!"

Shaniqua Tolliver was forty-one years old and possessed of a corn-fried, deep-south drawl and a needle-sharp intellect honed even sharper by long association with her genius boss. Shaniqua was a proud, loud, large-and-in-charge African American woman who dressed like a New Orleans street walker and commanded the business end of Paramar Clinic like William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings.

Kip had tried calling her "Duke" once, testing her mettle, but she'd railed back at him by informing him snidely that: "… we aint in Normandy, Sweetcakes … and I aint in the habit of wearin' a codpiece!" That ended that. These days he still called her "Neeka", and grinned with one-upmanship every time he caught her bristling.

Shaniqua glared across at Dr. Kevin Bernoski and lifted her lip in a deep dimpled sneer. They often sniped back and forth at each other in this manner. It kept things interesting on a boring afternoon. "What else can y'awl tell me about this Gregory House? At least give me something I can use to write into his profile. I can't believe y'awl'd stoop so low as to enlist a volunteer without finding out something about the man … or telling him something about us …"

Kip eyed her for a moment, considering. How much should he reveal about someone he'd never met; had only talked to briefly on the phone? He sighed. "Not much to tell. He's a doctor, believe it or not … diagnostics, nephrology. He read our article in JAMA. He's a man of few words. His application states why he wanted to see us. On the phone he said that he'd suffered a muscle infarction in his right thigh. Killed the whole quad, jammed up the nerves. Nasty stuff …

"Muscle death … extensive nerve damage. He's experienced chronic pain ever since. He offered to volunteer for us because his pain is getting worse. It begins at 'intolerable', he says, and goes up the scale from there. He's not sure how much longer he can live with it before he does something stupid.

"Some of his friends forced him into drug rehab recently, because they don't know the difference between 'dependence' and 'addiction'. His words. I had no reason not to believe him."

Bernoski stopped talking when he realized she was staring at him with huge black eyes in an expression of awed revulsion, both hands poised, midair, fingers locked into long, red-painted claws above the keyboard of her computer. It took a lot to shock Shaniqua, and Kip was impressed by the display.

"What!?"

She shook her headful of bright orange tangles, and he could see a shiver of cold, deep sympathy stiffen her thick shoulders. African American faith and compassion was a universal force of awesome strength in this woman. "What did you say was wrong with this guy? An infarction in his leg?"

Kip nodded. "Sucks, doesn't it?"

She nodded. "Oh yeah. Big time. He so needs to be here, poor baby boy. How in the hell did that happen? Is he even ambulatory?"

Kip shrugged. "I dunno," he said. "The conversation didn't get that far. Just that he was sick of being told what to do by everybody with a mouth …and he was leaving Friday night. He said he'd get here … when he gets here. And he's traveling alone."

Neeka shook her head again, expression darkening, even in a face already dark. "Oh man! He either has the balls of a warhorse … or he's a psycho!"

Dr. Bernoski smiled briefly. "I have to agree, kiddo. But I think he's legit. I could almost tell how much he hurts by the strain in his voice. Been there, done that. I just couldn't refuse him … and we'll do a workup and a profile when he gets here."

Kevin "Kip" Bernoski had been nothing, if not intrigued, by the sparse personal history House had allowed him. He had cringed at the list of compounded medical errors, his own included, as stated by the deep voice on the phone:

You didn't sue?

No. The damage was done. I was on staff, so my bills were paid, and I didn't need the money. I'd sure-as-hell like to get my leg back though … or find a way to relieve part … or all … of the damn pain. So, if you need a guinea pig, I'm your guy! I'm not sure how much longer I can go on like this …

Have you had thoughts of suicide?

Suicide? Hell no! Homicide, maybe, but not suicide.

The man was intelligent, sarcastic, totally honest, and Kip had caught the slightest hitch in the timbre of his voice as he spoke. Something was going on there, and he was interested in finding out what. Like a betting round in poker, one player paid to find out what cards were in the other players' hands. Kip found himself more than willing to pay a stiff price to see the rest of Dr. House's hand!

Bernoski shrugged and turned to walk away toward the marked doorways on the other side of the reception area. "I'm going back to the labs, and then on around to check on all our other 'kiddies'. If Dr. House shows up out front, call me. Okay?"

Shaniqua Tolliver nodded, preparing to return her attention to the spiral notebooks full of handwritten daily reports from their staff of researchers. Some of the handwriting was barely legible, to say the least, but Kip depended on her to keep it translated and entered into the system. She had never failed him, and nanocites had no regard for weekends or holidays! If she had not had a teen-age son, Shaniqua might never go home at all.

In order for Paramar Clinic to obtain funding for continued research and new medical procedures, detailed precision within the context of the submitted reports was a necessary evil. This clinic was at the cutting edge of a long series of breakthroughs in designer nanotechnology. The government, along with many private firms, was watching closely. "I'll keep an eye out," she told him, "and I'll let y'awl know if he shows up. Want me to have a wheelchair handy?"

He considered for a moment before he made his decision. "Yeah. Just in case. Maybe that wouldn't be a bad idea …"

She was already out of her chair with the key to the equipment storage room in her hand. "Can do. See y'awl later."

Bernoski walked away toward the door marked "Labs and Hospital", opened and walked through it. Back here, everything opened further into an immaculate corridor, which extended for some distance in both directions.

There were two labs; two doors to the left, one marked "#1", and the other, "#2". In the opposite direction, down the hallway to the right, doors were marked "Hospital: Suite #1, #2, #3." Kip crossed into the corridor and turned left, knocked lightly on the first, then walked in.

The area was large, full of heavy duty animal cages, all of them empty except one. He walked directly to the biggest, most heavily reinforced pen, which contained a streamlined, superbly muscled, pure white animal that resembled a large North American wolf. The animal came to attention and began an excited dancing and head bobbing and tail wagging that made Kip and the man at the table across the room look at each other and laugh.

"Hi Bobby!" Kip exclaimed, and the huge white dog began an excited whining for attention. "How ya doin', big boy?" He reached through the wires of the cage to scratch behind broad silken ears and make a fuss for a few moments.

"You too, Earl," Kip added as an afterthought to the other man. "Need your ears scratched too?"

Earl Keirkgaard, the big man in question, grinned and shrugged his shoulders slightly. "Up yours!" he grunted with a smile. He touched the thick joystick of his mechanical wheelchair and rolled forward toward his business partner and best friend with a look of pride on his face. "I think this guy's gonna be fine, Kip. He seems to have returned to his old self again, and he's back to acting like a puppy. I just gotta find a way to keep the big lug from going outside and grazing!"

The big dog continued to bounce around his cage in excitement, and had he not been missing most of his right front leg, Bobby was just as normal looking as any other two-to-three year old white German Shepherd. His big secret was, he was not two or three. He was thirteen. He was their first success story, and he kept on keeping on.

Kip Bernoski raised both eyebrows. "Wow! He's our miracle child, isn't he?"

"Yeah," Earl replied. "But that's why I've been monitoring him so closely. For awhile last night I thought we were gonna lose him. Then the big jerk puked up a wad of grass and weeds as big as your fist. About three this morning, he started to move around again. By seven, he was back on his feet. He wolfed down his breakfast an hour or so ago, and been begging for treats ever since."

Kip opened the door of the cage, lifted the heavy dog out of it and placed him gently on his feet on the floor. Bobby's ears went up like semaphores, and he stood gazing back and forth between his mentors, expectant. "Always hungry!" Kip groused good- naturedly. "Earl, he sure doesn't look like he almost got squashed by a bus. And you'd never know he's full of mechanical bugs! Now, if you could come up with a 'bug' mixture that works on you the way Bobby's worked on him …"

Earl tilted his blonde, curly head and looked the other way. Green eyes found an interesting nail hole to study on the opposite wall. Finally he spoke. "The technology isn't up to it, ol' buddy. Not yet. Don't think we haven't been working on it! We're just not ready. But the bugs got rid of my pain for me … thanks to Bobby …and I can concentrate again … and be productive again … and trust me, that's half the battle right there."

Kip smiled a little sadly, and nodded.

Two years previously, in a warehouse downtown, an older-model forklift with an unstable wheel was an accident waiting to happen. A heavy load of perishable cargo, and a stubborn lab rat-physician, too impatient to wait for a driver, hopped on to take the load to the lab. Twenty seconds later he lay trapped under the wreck after it went over. The accident had taken Earl's spinal cord and reconfigured it into something that resembled a pretzel. He lay in the hospital for close to a month before they even got him stable. The trauma had not entirely paralyzed his lower body. He had enough sensation that he screamed in pain every time they moved him.

His doctors did not want to do anything drastic for fear of killing what little nerve responses he had left, and so they gave him a morphine pump to suppress the worst of it, and searched for something more permanent.

Kip Bernoski's clinic came up in conversation many times at that hospital while Earl was there, but like physicians everywhere, those doctors were intensely suspicious. Too much "WOW" factor in modern medicine these days left even the most jaded of the old timers a little skittish.

One night Earl overhead two older physicians, consultants on his case, standing outside his door discussing Paramar Clinic and Kip Bernoski. Earl demanded to learn more. The rest, as they say, was history.

Earl, of course, ended up at Paramar, battling and finally overcoming a nasty morphine addiction. After the success of the original surgery on Bobby, who'd been rescued from certain death beneath the wheels of a Raleigh bus, Earl had volunteered to be next. He needed to put the drug addiction a long way behind him. He had been successful, and pain-free for nearly a year now. He had stayed on there as one of the most dedicated physician-researchers Kip had ever met, and they quickly formed a lasting friendship. But Earl's mobility had not been restored.

Earl said it didn't matter, but the rest of the staff … and Kip … knew he lied …

"You got the mutt's latest stuff all logged in?" Kip asked, filling in around the lengthening silence.

"Everything's over in my log book," Earl replied, glad for the reprieve. "'Shaw-neek-wah' will tear out her witchy-poo hair when she sees it."

"No doubt!" Kip said with a grin. "And by the way … we have that guy I talked to last month … House …coming in later. Probably today sometime. Chronic pain issues. Muscle infarction in his leg. You might want to think about talking to him …"

Earl nodded quickly. "Happy to do it," he said, then frowned darkly. "Infarction? In his leg?"

"Yeah … that's the same reaction I got from Neeka. Hers was just a little louder."

They were both interrupted by Kip's cell phone.

Shaniqua Tolliver's voice was only a little shy of hysterical.

"Kip! Kip? You might wanna get out here. As close to 'now' as you can make it!

"I think Gregory House has just arrived. That Honda y'awl told me he's driving? Well, it's a damned motorcycle! And he's parked in front of the office.

"Kip … that poor baby looks like death warmed over! We'll definitely need the wheelchair.

"He can't get off the bike …

"Hurry!"

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