Chapter IV: Something to Think About
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"How's he doing?" Cameron asked as she finished scrubbing up, pulling uncomfortable, medical latex gloves up around her wrists as she stepped into Princeton Plains-boro's Intensive Care Unit to accompany her colleague, Neurologist Eric Foreman.
"No significant change." He informed her, taking the liberty to glance up from Chase's file to give her a sympathetic look.
"Oh," Cameron sighed. Then, in an attempt to lighten the mood, she added, "well, at least he's not doing worse, right?" She tried to let out a little laugh; a carefree gesture to signify that she wasn't worried. But, the gesture barely tumbled from her lips before turning into a devastated sigh; not quite what she was going for.
"Hey," Foreman said bracingly, stepping up beside her and putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. "He'll be fine—Look, he's stable."
Cameron nodded slowly, a small, weak smile curling at the corners of her lips. "You're right," she conceded.
Foreman nodded reassuringly at her, gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze and turned back to the monitors.
Taking her queue from Foreman, Cameron was quick to follow his example. She turned to the end of Chase's hospital bed, briefly studying the chart hung on the end rail for attending physicians. After a brief once-over, she straightened up and turned to Foreman, motioning with a light tap to his forearm for allowance for her to see the remainder of Chase's file. Foreman consented and riffled through the papers, bringing the one she was seeking to the top.
She thanked him somewhat absently as her eyes skimmed over the file, taking in the figures and stats it spewed. Mouthing silently to herself as she read, her faint voice carried through the room, offering painful contrast to the shrill beep… beep… that echoed across the enclosure, exacerbated by a horrid chorus of the self-same sounds expelled from other EKGs around the room.
After a minute, she pulled back from the file, her eyes flitting—not in complete panic, though not all that subtly either—towards the aforementioned machines. Foreman watched, in the midst of his observations, with a mildly curious expression.
Cameron seemed to take some comfort in the continuous, steady spiking and falling of the pale green line read-off from the EKG.
"What's up?" Foreman asked after a moment; apparently curiosity had gotten the better of him.
"He's hypoglycemic," she replied curtly, sweeping past him and reaching for a hypodermic syringe off of the cart near his bedside. "Low blood sugar can cause seizures."
Foreman nodded. "It's probably what caused the first one—at his apartment, right?"
"Uh-huh," Cameron replied off-handedly, as she proceeded to fill the needle with a pale liquid substance and then commence to insert the tip into the IV port secured in the Radial artery of his left arm.
"Push 100 mg Thiamine and follow it with 50 mL Dextrose D50W and he'll be fine."
"Just did," Cameron mumbled withdrawing the empty syringe and discarding it. Then she reached for another syringe—the Dextrose solution—and uncapped it. As she proceeded to inject the new needle into the IV port she sighed. "I wonder why the EMTs didn't take care of it in the beginning, though. With glucose levels that low, you'd think they'd notice."
"They were probably more concerned with keeping him alive." Foreman remarked evenly.
"Their mistake could've killed him."
"But it didn't."
Cameron seethed. "Well, it could have. At least it's taken care of now." She smiled in a self-satisfied sort of way.
Suddenly, the door of the ICU flew open, the glass shaking from between the metal frame it was nestled in. As the door slammed, fragile instruments hung carefully along the wall, for easy and fast accessibility, shuddered violently, moving in resistance. They clanged painfully, the metallic sounds bouncing shrilly around the room for a few moments before stilling, and falling into place again. As the commotion faded into the distance, the uneven gait of two feet and a cane thrummed through the air, the noise a simple precursor to the person who pulled himself rather agitatedly into the room with them.
"House." Foreman nodded curtly.
"How novel; he wanted to grow up to be just like mommy." House groused in annoyance as he pulled himself into the room, stopping just short of Chase's bed, and regarding him with mild interest.
"Yeah," Cameron went on in disgust, throwing House a reproving look. "That's really someone to aspire to be like."
"Doesn't matter," Foreman stepped easily between them. "At this rate, he'll be dead like her too."
"What?" Cameron asked abruptly. "He's stable—Nowhere near dead. What're you getting at?"
Foreman shrugged. "Look at him."
Cameron gave him a confused look, raising an inquiring eyebrow at him. Then, after a moment, she did as he suggested and looked towards their colleague.
She didn't know what Foreman was getting at. "Look at him." Well, she was, and he looked the same as he had earlier. There was no significant change in his appearance. What was she supposed to be seeing? Then, she turned towards his monitors. Perhaps it was an internal problem. But, looking at the EKG, the oximetry meter, every thing seemed to be normal. Or, at least in a relatively normal range, she thought.
"What am I supposed to be seeing?" She asked after a moment, glancing back at Foreman.
"My God. It's no wonder you're not the Intensivist." House snapped, clearly annoyed.
Foreman turned to him with a quirked eyebrow and Cameron looked at him highly affronted, her eyes bright.
House fumbled in the pocket of his jeans for a moment, procuring a small orange prescription bottle. After a prolonged struggle against the cap, he managed to remove it and dump two small, white pills into the palm of his hand. He dry swallowed them thoughtlessly and continued on.
"Well, go on. Tell me Cameron. What are you supposed to be seeing?" He asked shortly.
She exchanged a glance with Foreman before replying.
"He-he's stable. Heart rhythm is steady; oxygenating is within—"
"—Is below range." Foreman cut across her. "His O2 levels are at 93. Normal levels are between 95 and 100."
"It's not too far out of range. After having come in drunk into a stupor, it's normal that his stats are lower than normal. Alcohol is a depressor, it has that effect on the lungs."
"His BAC was 2.6 when he came in this afternoon. By now it should be down; and his O2 stats should be up." Foreman argued.
"And they pay you a doctor's wages?" House remarked suddenly, his voice dripping in sarcasm.
"Well… considering we're doctors…" Foreman countered slowly, rolling his eyes.
"Apparently, not very good ones. You're missing the big picture."
"Big picture? Decreased O2 stats could mean a number of things. There's no big picture." Cameron sighed in exasperation.
"You're just blind. What did the tests reveal about our little wombat? You did do follow up tests, didn't you?"
"They didn't reveal anything unusual in his case. High BAC, low glucose, reduced platelet count… Nothing unusual about a case of over intoxication." Foreman concluded as he finished shuffling through Chase's case file to answer House's question.
"This was before you got him on IV Heparin, a Librium taper and wiped his system with activated charcoal, right?"
Cameron nodded. "And now, with glucose up again, and everything accounted for, everything that could have gone back to normal, is."
"Apparently, something's not normal."
"Like what?" Cameron sighed in annoyance.
"The little wombat's still asleep, what could that mean?" House posed thoughtfully.
"Alcohol in the blood could have an adverse affect on the Librium in his system. Could induce hypersomnia." Foreman suggested.
"The alcohol in his system at the time of arrival could do that on its own too," Cameron added.
"What're his most recent BAC levels?" House asked impatiently.
Again, Foreman returned to Chase's file, flipping unceremoniously through the pages for the latest lab results. After a moment, he looked up. "BAC from an hour ago was at 19. There' shouldn't be too much of a change from then to now."
"Even with the Librium in his system, after the lavage and activated charcoal, he shouldn't be this out." House shook his head, rapping his cane impatiently against the floor so that a dull echo traveled the length of the room. "What did the tox screen reveal?"
At this, Foreman and Cameron exchanged an uneasy glance.
"We didn't do one." Cameron informed House slowly.
House stared at her.
"Come on, House—" Foreman shrugged noncommittally, "—It's not like we need one. It's kind of obvious that it's the alcohol in his system doing this."
"Oh, obviously." House groused loudly. "It couldn't possibly be that his doctors are incompetent."
"Yeah… there's always that…" Foreman muttered under his breath.
House sighed. "It doesn't matter. Go home," he dismissed them, motioning absently towards the doors of the ICU.
"But, shouldn't we—?" Cameron cut in, her voice anxious.
"He's stable—He'll be fine. Go home."
"He's right," Foreman conceded, making a movement towards the door. "There's nothing more we can do tonight."
Cameron nodded slowly, letting out a long, winded sigh. "Yeah, you're right."
Then she followed Foreman outside, closing the doors behind her slowly. House stared after them, turning back to Chase only after their silhouettes had disappeared from his sight.
"So," he asked curiously, regarding Chase as he spun his cane idly around in his hand. "What are you hiding then, Chase?" He cast an inquiring look towards the monitors surrounding him. After a moment he shrugged in would-be resignation. "Well, it doesn't matter. Much as I'd love to see you self-destruct, Cuddy won't hear of it. So, looks like you're gonna live."
He turned slowly, making his way across the room with his cane. Standing at the door, he turned, looking back over his shoulder. "Next time you wanna off yourself at least do it right," he called, perhaps somewhat louder than necessary. "I don't need Cuddy on my back because of you, on top of everything else. And I don't appreciate the extra work of keeping your sorry wombat ass alive." He continued to grouse, his noticeably bad mood worsening.
With that, he grimaced slightly, as pain lanced through his let, and left.
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With some difficulty he had managed to ascend the stairs of the apartment complex and drag himself to his door. By time he stood before it, his normally foul mood had worsened exponentially; and not without precedent. Aside from an abysmal day at work—clinic duty that Cuddy had drug him to, Chase as his new case study—by time he had left that evening it had started to rain. And nothing fueled a foul mood quite like a hell-storm of freezing drizzle pouring down on you the second you hit the street.
He pushed open the door—unlocked since Wilson was already inside, he assumed—trademark scowl and glare in place and shrugged his overcoat off on the coat rack.
"Wilson!" He hollered, his harsh baritone voice menacing in the darkness until he found a light switch and flipped it on.
"Nice seeing you too!" came the shouted response from somewhere within the apartment.
At his friend's reply, House felt the beginnings of a smile tugging stubbornly at the corner of his lips; he settled for an amused smirk.
Judging by the sounds eclipsing the oncologist's own voice, House guessed he was in the living room watching some late-evening TV. That in mind, he walked down the hall and turned into the living room to join him.
As House entered, Wilson noticed that House's limp was more pronounced than usual as he hobbled across the room, leaning heavily against his cane, and collapsed thankfully onto the couch next to him.
"Bad day?" Wilson asked sympathetically as House propped his bad leg up on the coffee table and massaged it compulsively, eyes closed and teeth gritted.
"Get me a beer." House replied dryly after a moment, maneuvering his good leg onto the table as well and leaning back tiredly into the cousins of the couch.
"It's your house." Wilson protested.
"Right. And as long as you're staying in my house, you're my bitch. Get me a beer."
Wilson smirked. "I thought Chase was your bitch."
House turned to stare at him for a moment before shrugging and letting out an easy laugh. "I see Cuddy's been to see you."
Wilson put on a face of mock-disarray and pouted. "So you're cheating on me with a pretty boy?" He stood up and crossed his arms in front of him in an affronted manner, heading across the room. "I didn't think you were like that, House."
House scoffed, watching as his friend made a show of disappearing into the kitchen. When his back had disappeared, House called after him. "Me cheat? Never! I'm just a pimp!"
Chortling good-naturedly, Wilson returned from the kitchen with two beers in hand. He handed one to House as he retook his seat on the couch, and popped the other can open for himself. After a moment, and between a long drink, Wilson commented. "You, a pimp? Who would've thought?"
"What can I say?"
At this, Wilson shrugged and reached for the remote. A few minutes later, and after having gone through a large portion of stations, they finally settled on a channel. Some random obscure college football game; it's not like there was anything better on, they agreed.
"What's up with you?" Wilson asked a couple minutes into the game. He had finished off his own beer and was about to grab another, on the pretext of asking if House needed a refill, when he noticed that House hadn't even opened his first one yet.
House stared blankly at the unopened can before him for a moment before shrugging.
A look of comprehension came over Wilson's face, and he sat down again. "Oh, boy. This is about your new case, isn't it?"
House glanced at him. Apparently, Cuddy had been in to see him. There was no other way Wilson could have known about Chase's condition. He shrugged.
"Do you think I'm bad enough to drive someone to kill themselves?" House asked after a moment, temporarily startling Wilson with the abruptness and bluntness with which he had asked.
"That depends," Wilson began evenly. "Are we talking about Chase?"
"No, of course not!" House gasped. "We're talking about Cuddy! I was wondering how much she could take before driving herself off an overpass! What on earth made you think about Chase?"
Wilson rolled his eyes. "In that case, and I'm just going out on a limb here—yeah. You have a habit of being cruel to people—that's probably the only reason why Cuddy even lets you get away with having such crappy bedside manner."
House scoffed.
"Don't let it bother you. People—yes, even stupid ones—have free will. You can't be blamed for something they did to themselves."
"Who said I was bothered by it?" House snapped in annoyance, a scowl replacing the easy look he had adopted.
Wilson sighed, and knowing better than to argue when House was feeling his most misanthropic, he stood up. "Anyway, it's late, I want to get some sleep, and you should too."
House looked up at him a moment, almost in disbelief. "Are you telling me to get off my own couch so you can go to sleep?"
"I think I am, yeah."
House shrugged and moved his feet from the table, pulling himself upright. He bent down to pick up the unopened beer can and then turned and headed to the kitchen. Wilson watched him disappear, and after a few moments, the light in the kitchen went out and the steady thudding of House's feet and cane were dwindling into the distance.
"G'night, Jimmy!" Came a gruff voice, followed by a door closing.
Wilson shook his head and walked to the wall, switching off the lights as well. "Night House." He muttered.
Author's Ramblings: Well, there you have it, chapter 4. I think I did alright with it. Though, towards the end maybe House was a bit OOC, and I'm not at all sure I did Wilson justice. What do you think? And thoughts on the others too. I don't know if I'm doing them justice. As always, please leave your name at the door with a nice review, ne? I'd really appreciate your input if you read this, so don't hold back. Flames just as happily accepted as critiques. Thanks.
Blackrose