A/N: Sorry for the delay. From Friday through Monday, I had four straight days of separate unexpected car issues, only one of those involving my own car, but for the other days, I was the rescue transportation called who had to drop things and go retrieve friend/relative from the dead vehicle and help stabilize the situation. Needless to say, that chopped up my weekend royally, and work and Mom got the leftover time packed around the edges. Never had a chance for writing until today.

Hope you enjoy this quick, short update. Next is another shorter chapter with Wilson, which I'll try to get up tomorrow, and then after that will be the Friday session with Jensen, when things really start to happen.

(H/C)

House sighed as he tossed the printed consult request email onto the pile in the middle of the table in the conference room. Even the consult requests were boring this Thursday morning, nothing that needed attention in person. He had gone through the emails and letters with the egglings, and they had come up after some discussion with correct answers each time, but they were easy answers. He wished again for a case that challenged them. Seeing how they reacted to a crashing patient, how they adjusted as new information came in, how they sharpened other team members and sparked his own insights on a differential simply couldn't be recreated on simple consult requests that any decent doctor should have been able to solve. He needed a live test to really start to sort them out. Instead, he was stuck with an academic exercise.

Well, if that was all he had at the moment, it could still be useful in revealing how they worked, even if less so than a hands-on case. He had spent private moments yesterday afternoon and last night speed reading the FDR book, then doing some research on the internet, both double checking facts and double checking credentials. He stood now and approached the whiteboard. "A 63-year-old man loses consciousness and dies a couple of hours later. What could have killed him?"

Hollingwood was first out of the gate. "What symptoms was he having?" A by-the-book, unimaginative question, but a useful and relevant one.

"He complained of a strong headache," House replied.

"Immediately before he collapsed?" Ramirez clarified. "Sudden onset?"

"Apparently," House told her. "Since he lost consciousness, nobody got much chance to question him on specifics. It got sharply worse enough for him to mention it then, even if it had been present earlier."

"Cerebral hemorrhage would be the top candidate," Ramirez said. The other two grudgingly nodded, as did Taub and Foreman, who were on the sidelines. They had been told not to jump into any differentials whether real or academic today until the egglings had had a chance to wrestle the case themselves for a while.

Templeton was trying so hard to come up with a different, original thought rather than following the other two that House almost felt sorry for his brain cells under the visible strain. "Was he being treated for any chronic conditions at the time?"

"Oh, according to his doctor, he was in terrific health. Absolutely glowing reports, couldn't have been doing better, and his death was a total 'bolt from the blue.'"

Hollingwood was still trying to follow the manual. "What did the autopsy reveal?"

"There wasn't an autopsy done."

For all Templeton's painful effort, it was Ramirez who struck bonus points first. "Is this a real patient or hypothetical?"

"Does it matter?" House shot back, but his eyes had brightened.

"Yes. What you just said, the statements from his doctor. If those were actual statements made in pretty much those words himself about a real patient, it's a case of overkill. He's trying too hard to make his point instead of just saying 'previous good health.' It almost sounds like a press release."

House gave her an approving nod. "Assume that it's an actual patient and that his attending physician did use words like those, over and over, with emphasis. Why would he go to such trouble to make it sound like there hadn't been any prior problems?"

"CYA," Templeton responded immediately. "The PCP thought he could have screwed up and wanted to save his own reputation."

House wrote across the top of the whiteboard, speaking at the same time. "Everybody lies. Remember that. Not only do almost all of the patients we see lie, but sometimes, the doctors who have treated them previously also lie." Under the heading of Everybody Lies, he wrote CYA. "Why else would a doctor lie?"

Giving the doctor the benefit of the doubt, Hollingwood stated, "He might not have deliberately lied from the start. He might have just missed signs."

House added Unintentional Mistakes underneath CYA. "Could be. Patient is still dead, though."

"Or it could be misinformation," Hollingwood added. "The patient himself lied to the doctor."

"Why?" House asked, adding Patient Lies.

Templeton shrugged. "Maybe the patient didn't think earlier symptoms mattered. Patients can be idiots about their own health and ignore things by telling themselves it's no big deal." He was trying for some brownie points by calling a patient an idiot, something he'd already heard House do a few dozen times just in his week with him, but the reaction wasn't the one he'd hoped for; he was surprised to see House flinch slightly.

House quickly pulled his thoughts back from his mother. "Yes, they are," he said, but the confirmation was more sad than annoyed. He added Patient Doesn't Think It Mattered to the column, then turned back to the table. "Anything else strike you about this now deceased 63-year-old and his case-whitewashing doctor?"

"That's the second time you've mentioned his age," Templeton said. "Is that relevant?"

"Could be."

"Did he smoke? Exercise? Eat indiscreetly? Atherosclerosis is a primary suspect for a hemorrhagic stroke, and while 63 is slightly on the youngish side for that, lifestyle could have an impact."

"The patient smoked two packs a day for decades," House told Hollingwood. "He tried to swim regularly but didn't get any exercise on his feet."

Ramirez straightened up. "On his feet," she repeated thoughtfully. "Was that actually a press release from the PCP, not just sounding like one?"

"Maybe." House let her come to it, but he knew she had the ID pegged.

"Was the patient President of the United States?"

"Up until he died," House confirmed.

Hollingwood protested. "If you're talking about Franklin Roosevelt, he certainly had health problems at the end."

"Such as?" House prompted.

"Look at the pictures from his last year. I also seem to remember reading somewhere he had heart problems. Did his doctor actually say he was in terrific health?"

"Yes. Right up to the end, no health problems whatsoever, and the intracranial bleed that most likely killed him couldn't possibly have been predicted."

Templeton rolled his eyes. "Definitely CYA."

"But at whose instigation?" House tapped the words on the whiteboard for emphasis. "We have here a President who is proven to have lied, repeatedly, to America about his health. The lengths he went to to conceal his paralysis were heroic. What's even more unbelievable is that the press cooperated. Do you know there are only three pictures of him in a wheelchair? Out of thousands of shots covering decades, only three. And only one of those was published during his lifetime. If any reporter ever got a shot of him in his chair, the reporter would voluntarily expose his film. If he wouldn't, his fellow reporters would do it for him. No photographs while being carried up stairs or put in and out of his car. His braces were painted black to keep them from showing in photos, and once he was president, he hired somebody from Paramount to work in the press office and dictate circumstances and lighting for photos to make sure he looked his best. Any reporter who took a picture of him without advance warning to let him strike a pose lost all White House press privileges. There are public quotes from him and his doctors stating that he had recovered almost all leg function. If he lied about all that, which there's enough proof on to be certain, who's to say that he didn't lie about other things?"

"Like the current President lied," Ramirez said. They had reviewed a few days ago the chief executive's recent case from last year.

"Right. Not only does everybody lie, but politicians have a whole separate layer of reasons for it. Maintaining public image and getting the vote are paramount. With the current one, his lie turned out to be irrelevant medically in the end, but going into that case, I wasn't asking if this President had lied about anything. Any President has lied to the voting public, so of course he lied; goes with being a President. It took him a while to see me as a doctor instead of a vote. My question was what did he lie about and was it relevant? We didn't know relevance until we knew the details."

"So you think FDR might have lied about his health in other ways besides polio?" Hollingwood asked.

"Quite possibly. FDR's doctor definitely lied to the public. But he could have been acting according to his patient's wishes all along. That doctor stated in his memoirs that the health of the chief executive is his own private business, nobody else's. Given that statement and the repeated over-the-top utopian guarantees of health during his patient's life as well as after his death, what do you think the medical accuracy of those memoirs is worth? The official doctor was also hand selected by Woodrow Wilson's doctor, who was a close friend of Roosevelt's, and that doctor set an awfully high bar for lying to the public. That one actually said once that he would not certify Wilson as disabled under any circumstances whatsoever after his stroke. So his protege became FDR's doctor and immediately joined in the already established coverup of his patient's paralysis. What else could the two of them have conspired to lie about? Or just one of them, if you think the doctor lied alone about other health and FDR reserved all of his physical lies for his polio. Never assume that either the patient or the patient's doctor is telling you everything."

"Wait a minute," Templeton said. "There wasn't an autopsy performed?" House shook his head. "On the President of the United States, who died according to his doctor unexpectedly? No autopsy?"

"No autopsy," House confirmed.

"That job does age people incredibly," Ramirez said. "All of them look decades older coming out than they did going in. Given that he and his doctor lied, stress still could have played a big role."

"He was the 10th youngest President ever by age at death," House countered. "And four of the ones who died younger than that were assassinated, which presumably shortened their otherwise-natural lifespan."

"What about medical records?" Templeton asked. "Surely somebody's done an FOI request and not just read the doctor's memoir."

"Most of the medical records have disappeared from Bethesda," House said. Even Foreman raised an eyebrow at that. "Eleanor asked some years later for his records, and at that point, it was discovered that the chart is 95% not there. Nobody has seen it since."

"Are you suggesting he didn't die of a cerebral hemorrhage?" Hollingwood asked.

"We don't know exactly what he died of. There wasn't an autopsy," House reminded her.

Templeton was still trying to come up with a different answer. "If it was a cerebral hemorrhage, and the sudden complaint of headache certainly tends to indicate that, there are other causes besides atherosclerosis. Could have been a ruptured aneurysm. Could have been a spontaneous bleed from a lesion."

"There are rumors that he wasn't hitting on all cylinders mentally at the Yalta conference with Stalin and Churchill," said Ramirez. "That was a few months prior to his death."

"You like history," House noted. She had been first to get the patient's ID, too. "Why?" he asked, remembering Thomas saying he appreciated the inner glimpse at how people ticked.

"Why do my motives for liking history matter?" she asked.

"Because you're being asked by your prospective future employer," House persisted.

She hesitated, weighing if he really would apply that to his decision, but she was afraid to test him too far. "I like studying how things went wrong in world events."

"Trying to pick out past mistakes so as not to repeat them," House suggested. "Project much?" She sat silently, looking at him with her shielded eyes, and abruptly, unexpectedly, he felt sorry for her. At least at this moment. He changed the subject, looking at his watch. "It's almost lunch time. This afternoon, unless we get an interesting case, each of you can try to find health problems that FDR might or might not have had. If you quote other sources, which is about all we have here, I expect a statement along with your results of how that person or source might have lied - or simply been mistaken," he added, with a nod to Hollingwood, "and why. Just because you see it on the internet or even on paper doesn't mean it's fact. Keep your minds engaged while reading."

The egglings stood and exited, followed by Foreman and Taub. House capped his marker while mentally comparing motives with history for Thomas and Ramirez. The old man simply seemed to enjoy people watching even across decades. Ramirez never did anything without undertones. He wondered what Hadley herself would have made of today's differential.

Wrenching himself out of thoughts of the past, he headed off to collect Wilson for lunch.