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"What ELSE could it possibly be?" House asked/yelled at his team. He put his hand on his forehead, trying to massage away the headache that was forming due to exhaustion from being up all night deliberating.
"We've gone through every possibility we can think of, House, it's just not making any sense." Foreman droned, just as irritated as House and the rest of the team.
Just then, Maxine burst into the office, looking pasty and shaken.
House straightened up in his seat, fully alert now, "What is it?"
"She started vomiting, the nurse helped me clean it up, but Riley said her neck was stiff and then her...her eyes just rolled back," Maxine was sobbing now, "She wont wake up," she whispered with the voice of a broken woman.
House jumped up immediately, "Shit, Foreman, go do a lumbar puncture now! Cameron, start her on amphotericin B and Miltefosine! Chase, prep for running a Naegleria fowleri test for when Foreman finishes the spinal tap." All three doctors rushed out of the room, House began to sweat slightly and he put on his best professional, calm face for the child's mother, "Maxine, did Riley go swimming in a lake or a pond or anything like that, about a week ago?"
Maxine was trying to compose herself and also trying her best to remember the events of the past week, it was all too much, a whirlwind of emotions was filling her. All she could think of was travelling from doctor to doctor, all week.
She finally remembered, "Yes, she went to the lake with some friends, we live in Texas, they went diving off of a quarry somewhere about an hour away from the house...I didn't think anything about it, Oh, God, why?!"
House put his hand to his head and began limping fast out the door, toward her daughter's room, with Maxine in tow. "Greg!? What is wrong with my baby. What is Naegleria Fowleri?" She was nervous...no, she was petrified.
House didn't respond, he went in the room and watched as Foreman finished the spinal tap. He walked over and checked her pupils for dilation, he felt her neck, and then, as Cameron entered into the room, he grabbed the medication from her and started filling the IV with the composure of the seasoned doctor that he was.
When she started to code, House was shouting out orders, pushing her bed down, and springing into action that Maxine couldn't keep up with. He told her to get out of the room, she reluctantly listened to him, and she watched through the glass wall as they worked to save her baby's life.
She watched, wearily, as House shoved a tube down her throat, as the other doctors handed him equipment, and as nurses came running in rolling a cart.
The beeping on the monitor made the horrific sound that meant her daughter's heart had stopped beating, and Maxine stopped breathing. Only when the steady beeping came back, did she exhale. A wave of relief hit her like a freight train.
When it was all done, the doctors and nurses left the room, looking disheveled but relieved. House collapsed into the chair beside Riley's bed, his elbows on his knees, and his head in his hands.
Maxine walked into the room with shaky legs, kneeling beside the chair, as she waited for him to say something, anything.
"I'm so sorry Mac, I'm so terribly fucking sorry." He whispered, painfully. A tear had reached his eye, he tried to force it away, but knowing what he knew and knowing how horribly devastated he was about to make Mac, he couldn't stop the drop from falling down his face.
Maxine collapsed next to the chair beside him, looking up at him wide-eyed and child-like. She felt hopeless, helpless, like her whole world was about to come crashing down. She didn't know why he was apologizing, "Her heart is beating, right? She's going to be okay, right? Right!?"
"Naegleria fowleri is a brain eating amoeba...it causes an infection when water goes up the nose, typically from swimming or diving or water skiing in warm freshwater that is stagnant. Mac," He looked down at her, his eyes piercing hers with an intensity she had forgotten, "she's not going to make it. Once it gets to this point, a comatose state, there really isn't anything we can do...she maybe has seven days left, but probably not even that." His voice grew quieter and quieter as the last part of the sentence came out. He waited for her reaction.
She sat silently, her butt hitting her calves in defeat. She let his words process with a stone still face, desperately trying to understand what he was saying. "My daughter...Riley...she's… she's going to die? Just like that? She was fine a week ago, Greg, she was fine…"
"I know…" He whispered, averting his eyes, "I don't know what to say."
She stared at him for a moment, and then she lurched up, hitting his arm with a closed fist as hard as she could. House winced, but let her, he watched as she brought her other fist down on his shoulder, she began hysterically hitting him and the chair simultaneously. He dropped his cane, grabbing both of her arms, as he maneuvered himself onto the floor with her. He pulled her to him, holding her as tightly as he could.
"YOU'RE WRONG! You must be wrong! PLEASE, NO!" She wailed, sobbed, and shouted through her tears, into his chest. The pure guttural and raw intensity of her weeping made House's heart break. He tried his best to suppress his own tears, as he held the woman he had forgotten he cared so deeply about.
He would never have been the one to tell a patient's mother this news if it were anyone else. He would never sit on the floor, with his leg screaming in pain, with the patient's mother as she cried and hit and writhed in his arms; if it were anyone else. He would never have felt the deep, stabbing, ache that he now felt, if it were anyone else.
That realization hit him like a ton of bricks as he clung to Mac just as much as she was clinging to him in that moment.
Mac wasn't anyone else, she mattered, she was the only thing that mattered at all to him right now.
So, he sat there with her. He let her hit him over and over again. He held her as she continued to sob. He stayed for what felt like hours, until she finally, fitfully succumbed to the exhaustion from her efforts. She slowly started breathing normally, then deeper, until all the energy left her body and he held her limp body against his chest.
He was terribly uncomfortable, not only physically but emotionally as well. He was trying his damnedest to be strong for her, but watching her completely unravel in such a way, sent an ache through his soul that he had never felt before. His eyes found Riley's face, unconscious, breathing through a tube (had he put that there? Was it there when he came in? Everything felt upside down and surreal...He didn't even know what day it was at this point.)
At some point he had drifted off, somehow, and was abruptly awakened by Cameron, Chase and Foreman, all with somber looks on their face. Drs. Cuddy and Wilson were soon to follow, curious as to what was going on. House watched as his ducklings filled the two in on the inevitable fate of the child, and he cringed when both of their faces fell into the same somber look.
They all looked down at House and Mac, with pity and a sadness that made House irrationally angry. He suppressed it, only because Mac was finally asleep and he would not be the one to wake her up to such a harsh reality.
In a low, menacing way, he told them, "Get. Out."
There was such a demanding tone in his voice, that it left no room for questions, and the audience dismissed themselves as quickly as they came in.
Wilson was the only one who hesitated slightly, but before he could get a word in edgewise, House angrily spat, "Get the fuck out."
Wilson left quickly, almost tripping over himself as he exited the room.
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