December 2000 - Princeton, NJ
Your parents want you to come home for Christmas. Wilson wants you to come over for Christmukkah. You'd prefer to drink yourself into a nice, warm stupor on Christmas Eve and wake up on New Year's Day, perfectly oblivious to the joyfulness and idiocy that accompanies the holiday season.
Instead, you end up at the hospital with a patient. 23 year old female, medical student at Princeton, referred to you by the cardiologist to whom she was referred to by the neurologist to whom she was referred to by her primary care physician. She went from having a small rash (hence the PCP ) to a few headaches (hence the neurologist) to neurocardiogenic syncope (hence the cardiologist) before developing acute kidney failure (hence you, the nephrologist). Now her heart's failing and she doesn't qualify for a transplant and she's going to be dead before sunrise.
She had the balls to crack a good joke about your cane, though, and you still don't know what exactly is killing her, so you're spending your Christmas Eve with her, the dying 23 year old medical student.
You've been back at work since April, but only in infectious disease and nephrology and only part time; between your own chronic pain problem and the chronic stupidity problem afflicting everyone else, you can only take so much.
Up until this case, you'd nearly forgotten how it felt to have a true medical mystery to solve. The mental log of symptoms and medications and test results, the infinite puzzle pieces that you - and only you - are able to put together, the rush of adrenaline and frustration and anger when you think you've solved it, only to realize your patient is still dying. And though you haven't solved it yet, you're beginning to remember the taste of the satisfaction when you do. It's distracting you from the pain in a way that old men on dialysis and college athletes with staph infections doesn't. It's giving you a sense of purpose that you thought you'd never feel again.
Once you figure out what's killing your patient, or what has already killed her by the time you do, you're going to talk to Cuddy about the Diagnostics program she promised you before the infarction. You're going to tell her the truth - that you need this - and because she feels such overwhelming guilt for your current, permanent situation, she'll agree.
It'll be the best Christmas present you've ever gotten yourself.