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Hippocratic Oath
by willywonka3435
"I will prescribe regimen for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone. To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug nor give advice which may cause his death."
"To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug, nor give advice which may cause his death."
"To please no one will I prescribe a deadly drug..."
"Everybody lies."
Voices echoed mockingly in his head. He heard himself reciting his oath over and over. Nothing he tried would shake the lines loose. What he was about to do was overriding everything he'd spent years telling others. He said everyone lied, yet he was taking one person's word as gospel. And worse of all, he kept asking himself why. Why.
There was a part of him that knew he shouldn't want the man to die. That part of him, the part that had spoken up when he'd taken the Hippocratic Oath, the part that kept him awake late at night thinking over and over his patients' problems when he should have been sleeping--heaven knows he got little enough sleep as it was--was telling him what he wanted was wrong. He'd done plenty of low things in his life, but that was the one thing he could never stand.
He couldn't do what he knew was wrong.
But he didn't know whether or not this was wrong, and that was the worst of all. He was questioning his own decisions, and he knew from experience that only led to trouble. He couldn't keep the man bedridden forever. He couldn't let him go, either, because the other part of him, the part that wouldn't let him give Vogler's speech, the part that sensed--he couldn't explain it, but it did--when a patient wasn't ready to go home, was speaking up loud and clear, telling him that there was something wrong with the man, something horribly wrong, and he just couldn't let him walk out the door.
Was that because his patient was really ill?
That was what he liked to think--but what Wilson said made him start to wonder if it was the truth.
It made him start to wonder if maybe the man wasn't sick at all. It made him start to wonder if maybe he didn't really have any reason at all for keeping him here. It made him start to think that he wasn't keeping his patient for health reasons; it made him start to question his judgment. And that could only lead to disaster.
He sighed. He leaned his cane against the wall and rested his head on his hands. He was tempted to bury his face in his palm like Wilson, but decided against it. That would be reaching a new low. Once he started that, next thing he knew he'd be wearing ugly ties and complaining about his wife--well, if he were married, that is.
He gazed out across the dark city and wondered why he'd quit coming up here.
Then the door groaned, and he remembered.
"He's sick, paranoid, and you keep hammering him about me?"
He didn't answer. He wanted to hear the rest of what she had to say.
"And then you run away like a twelve-year-old. Go hide on the roof like you always do."
Slowly, he turned around. He almost wanted to close his eyes. Hadn't the removal of his leg been enough? Wasn't the fact that he was permanently crippled enough? When he woke up pumped full of morphine, floating on a cloud, too drugged to even think but conscious enough to know there was something missing--when his system cleared and the pain hit for the first time--when he told her he never wanted to see her again--when anger still clouded his vision and he finally knew what seeing red really meant--then he'd thought it was enough. He'd thought he'd never want her again.
All he had to do was see her face again to know he was wrong.
And that was why he wanted to close his eyes. But it wouldn't work because he couldn't close his nose so he'd keep smelling that distinctive scent of hers, the scent that wasn't in his home any more; he couldn't close his ears so he'd keep hearing the sound of her voice, the same sound that he couldn't bring himself to erase from his answering machine; he couldn't close his mind.
He forcibly curved his lips into a mocking smile. He met her eyes.
"I haven't been up here in five years."
That was all he said, but he knew she'd get the message. Their gazes were locked for a few moments and then she lowered hers; he'd known she would. Neither of them said anything. He shifted his foot and knew he should.
"I don't know what's wrong with him," he admitted. He knew the man was going to die if he didn't do something. But he didn't know what; and he thought maybe he didn't want to find out.
Of course, he couldn't tell her that. He did owe her an explanation. Some kind of one. Until he decided what he was actually doing.
"It's not Alzheimer's," he said; might as well start at the beginning. "It's not encephalitis; it's not environmental; it's not immunological." He paused, drew a deep breath. "Every test is negative, every time. He's perfectly healthy--but his brain is dying."
She didn't respond. He thought that was sort of odd. Either she was going to rebel and tell him he was wrong and her husband was fine and not dying at all, or she was going to tell him he was right and demand to know exactly what he was going to do about it. Then she raised her head an inch at a time and he looked into her eyes again and he was nearly destroyed.
She was crying.
The last time he'd seen her cry he'd been lying in bed. The last time he'd seen her cry she'd been asking him to forgive her. The last time he'd seen her cry he'd turned her away. He'd been in so much pain he couldn't think rationally. He couldn't think to forgive her.
He owed her something better than that, he thought.
He picked up his cane in one hand and stroked the cool wood idly. She kept her gaze fixed on his. Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes. He couldn't bear to look at her any more, so he took a halting step, and another, and another, and found himself closer to her than he'd been in years. Five years, as a matter of fact.
He lifted his right arm and put it around her shoulders. Then he did the same with his left. He didn't know if she was going to respond for a minute--after all, she was married--and his heart nearly stopped until she put her arms around his waist and rested her head on his chest and exhaled a shaky breath, and then it began beating faster than he could ever remember. He wondered briefly if he was going into cardiac arrest and then remembered he was a doctor and should know what that felt like and no, he wasn't. He settled for rubbing her back and sniffing her hair.
He'd missed her.
"I haven't given up," he said quietly.
"So what do we do?"
When she spoke, he felt the vibrations of her words against his heart.
"We wait," he said, for lack of a better answer. Somehow just holding her made him feel more confident.
She sniffled. Normally the sound would have been unladylike, but with her, it was okay.
"For what?"
This was tricky. "Something to change," he said. He was about to continue his speech, try to reassure her; try to tell her everything was going to be okay; he might have stayed that way for a little while, but she shifted and he felt the diamond on her wedding ring poke against his ribs, and he looked into her eyes and realized she wasn't his any more.
And he looked into her eyes and realized he couldn't lie to her.
So he did what he had to do. He did what he knew was right. And it was one of the hardest things he'd ever done.
He stepped back, back out of her embrace, and he told her the truth. Because everybody lied, but he couldn't.
"It's one of the great tragedies of life," he said; "something always..."
She studied him; she was serious, but the effect was ruined by the teardrops in her eyelashes--he wanted to kiss them away.
He couldn't.
"Something always changes," he said, and turned away and opened the door and left.
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Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House (and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property of Fox Television, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
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