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Respect
by RococomS
Title: Respect
By: RococoMS
Pairing: Gen; House/Cameron without real shippy undertones.
Rating: Pg 13 ish?
Warnings: Extensive description of medical/surgical procedures, not for the easily queasy (though, if you're easily disgusted, not sure this is the show for you anyway...)
Spoilers: Three Stories
Word Count: 3452
Summary: A post Three Stories One-shot. What does Cameron do with the information she has gleaned from the lecture?
Authors Note: It's been a long time since I wrote a fic, but this one has been swirling around for a while. That said, if it stinks, please tell me so I don't spread it around.
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As the medical students filtered by her, Cameron couldn't quite snap herself out of the spell of the last few hours. It had started as a normal morning, but now she had a feeling that this was a day which would be long remembered by all who were present.
As the room emptied, she caught snippets of the conversations amongst her. Most were trivial; talking about their next classes, or what they were planning for the upcoming weekend. Only a few seemed to grasp any idea of the importance of what had just taken place before them.
"Do you that patient sued the hospital?"
"What an idiot! Why not just cut off the leg and get it over with?"
"I wonder how that guy is doing now?"
It took a measure of self control for Cameron not to shout out "You morons, the patient was standing right there in front of you!", but her own preoccupation with the former question, along with the knowledge that House would kill her if she made any kind of connection between himself and what had just transpired kept her quiet.
She wouldn't soon forget the look he had given her when she piped up the diagnosis from the back of the room. Cameron had a feeling that it was less due to the fact she had cut short his torture of the students, and more that she, unlike the students had realized the true nature of the illness and his lecture.
Cameron fell into step behind Foreman and Chase as followed behind the last of the students leaving the hall. She absently listened to their conversation on the way back to the diagnostic medicine offices and settled into the conference room. Taking a seat at the table, Cameron stole a glance towards Houses' office. She saw him set his cell phone down on the desk then unceremoniously dump himself into his chair and lift his right leg onto the footstool. After a moment, he reached down below his desk and emerged with what Cameron recognized to be his beloved Ipod. Putting on the earphones, she knew that music was now blaring, in the hopes it would help drown out the morning.
Cameron nearly jumped out of her chair as Chase placed his hand on her shoulder.
"Sorry" Chase said sheepishly. "I said, we're heading down to the cafeteria for lunch." He gestured towards Foreman, already standing and waiting at the door. "Wanna join us."
It took her a minute to think about the question. "Ah... no, thanks." She managed to get out. "I, uh, brought my lunch today."
"OK", Foreman said, not giving Chase a chance to pry further. She shot him an appreciative glance and he nodded back at her, shooing Chase out the door in front of him.
The boys left the room, and again Cameron was left alone with her thoughts. She stole another glance into Houses' office, only to find Wilson had appeared and somehow managed to wake House from his musical reverie without being maimed. From the looks of it, Wilson was trying to convince House of something, and sure enough, after only a short exchange, House moved his leg down off the rest, placed it on the floor and lurched his body upward in that way that Cameron found both awkward and oddly graceful. Cameron's eyes followed the two men as they left the office, not missing the hand Wilson placed on Houses shoulder as they walked out the door.
There had been a few times during House's lecture where Cameron had stolen a look at Wilson only to find him looking close to tears. His one vocal outburst aside, Wilson had listened as raptly to the story as Houses' own fellows had, as if it was as much a mystery to him as it was to them. In fact, if she had to describe it, Wilson's emotions throughout watching his friend on stage had seemed to oscillate between sadness, pride, and oddly- guilt?
She couldn't figure the last part out, except that there were parts of House's explanation that didn't quite fit with Cameron's (albeit limited) knowledge of what had transpired. It was in between those facts that Cameron's curiosity now lie.
She tried to shake the thoughts from her head, and looked for a distraction. She hadn't in fact brought a lunch, but despite her not having had breakfast that morning, she found she couldn't fathom the thought of eating.
When a few menial tasks on the computer provided a useless diversion, she finally decided enough was enough. Getting up, she headed out the office with questions brewing in her mind, and no source likely to pony up any answers.
Forty minutes of infant-holding therapy later, she still wasn't any more mentally calm, but she had a plan of action in mind. She headed out the doors of the nursery, and headed down towards the basement.
She almost chickened out twice before making it to her destination, and paused at the door, fixing her hair and adjusting her blouse. Taking a deep breath, she knocked on the door marked "Records" and entered.
To her surprise, Donny, the twenty-something overly amorous medical records clerk was nowhere to be seen; in his place at the desk was an older Asian woman, looking entirely bored with her game of solitaire on the computer. She looked up from her game only when Cameron reached the desk and cleared her throat.
"Can I help you?" she asked in heavily accented English.
"Yeah, is Donny working today?" Cameron asked, not sure which answer she was hoping for.
"No, Donny sick- I'm the temp. Can I help you?" The clerk looked thoroughly disgusted for having to engage in any conversation at all.
"Yes, thank you." Cameron said, crossing out Plan A: Flirt with Clerk in her mind and hoping that this temp was new to the hospital. "I need the medical records for a patient..."
"Ok, your name, Doctor..."
"Cameron, Allison Cameron."
"Ok, Dr. Cameron. And your patients name?"
Cameron took a deep breath. "Gregory House".
To her immense relief, there was no flash of recognition in the clerks eyes as typed the information into her computer, then headed back to the rows of files behind her. She emerged a moment later with a chart, had Cameron sign a check-out form and they were done.
"Thank you" Cameron said as she grabbed the file and headed briskly towards the door. There was no reply from the clerk, who was already back at her game.
Shutting the door of the records room, Cameron breathed a sigh of relief, and stole a glance at the chart, making sure it was the one that she was looking for. After ensuring its authenticity, she weighed her options. House was off with Wilson, and she supposed he was gone for the day. Cuddy certainly wouldn't be after him following this morning, and they currently had no patients. For the same reason, she supposed Foreman and Chase would be taking a nice long lunch before taking over their clinic duty for the afternoon.
That meant the diagnostic medicine office should be nice and empty- perfect.
Despite her mental calculations, she entered the office cautiously, making sure she was indeed alone before making a beeline to her desk. Sitting down, she stole another glance around, and then looked down.
Taking a deep breath, she grasped the cover of the manila file and began to peel it back, almost reverently, afraid of what she might find inside. Opening the file in front of her, she took purchase of what it contained. Although she had dealt with, written in, handled and in every way been intimately familiar with patient files before, suddenly her exploration of this file might as well have been her first foray into a medical record.
The right side was thick with notes and reports, and she skipped past the first twenty or so pages, the most recent entries with physicians' notes on exams, physical therapy reports and lab results. Somehow peeking at the most recent entries seemed a too-great violation of privacy- but the instant that thought crossed her mind, Cameron instantly chastised herself. "Like this entire thing isn't one big privacy invasion" she mumbled to herself as she flipped to the pages in the back.
She found the section she was looking for- first, a clinic visit November 12th, 1999, and a prescription for Keflex. A quick glance down at the prescribing physician's name, and she isn't surprised when she doesn't recognize it.
Next page, November 15th, 1999, and an admission to the hospital under the same doctor, this time with a basic Complete Blood Count and Urinalysis, but to Cameron's shock, still no chemistry profile and the only mention of any limb involvement is in the doctors notes on diagnosis for the day. "Muscle strain secondary to urinary tract infection."
Things start to take a more interesting turn the next day, when the handwriting changes on the patient report. Suddenly Cameron felt things shifting into place. She recognized the new handwriting. Sure enough, at the bottom of a lengthy dissertation of test results and an uncertain prognosis, the chart is signed. Lisa Cuddy, MD- Chief of Vascular Medicine.
Puzzle pieces suddenly fall into place and suddenly so many things are much clearer to Cameron than ever before. Cuddy's presence in the lecture; her allowance of House to spend so much time off clinic duty, and subsequent pressure back to the job. New questions now are forming Cameron's head as she tries to make sense of this extremely important and until now absolutely absent bit of information.
Cameron can't help but feel like she's reading something of the equivalent of watching that movie, Titanic. Intellectually, she knows the ship is going to sink, yet part of her wants to stand up and scream "You idiots, there's an iceberg!"
She shook of the feeling of impending doom that was shrouding her, and switched to the left side of the folder. The bottom half was well endowed with the pink copy of every prescription written and filled for the patient and Cameron didn't have to flip through them to know what that drug of choice has been.
Behind the prescriptions, a clear plastic folder caught Cameron's eye. It's unusual, but not unheard of for patient medical files to include things like information regarding hospital billings or past or pending lawsuits, usually included only if the information might be relevant to any future medical issues that were to come up. She pulled out a neatly stapled packet of papers, not quite sure what this interesting addendum to this chart might hold.
The cover letter is dated February of 2000, and goes on for several paragraphs outlining the facts of the case blandly, in much the way Cameron has come to understand they transpired. But the last paragraph changes tones, so much so that she has to read it twice to fully understand the implications hidden in its undertones.
"As my work with Dr. Gregory House has come to an end at his insistence, I regret that the information contained herein will not be used to provide assistance or closure to this catastrophic and ultimately avoidable tragedy. However, I ask that this information is kept intact, in the event that Dr. House should ever wish to come back and pursue what is in my opinion in his absolute right to claim any and all damages associated with his medical care, physical therapy, loss of mobility and whatever other damages can be provided."
The letter is signed Stacy Hollmann, Attorney at Law, and it took a few minutes for Cameron to realize that this Stacy is his Stacy, Warner obviously being her married name.
She is even less prepared for what is behind the letter- pages of photos taken during what must have been that fateful surgery. Muscle death and the implications of it were never as clear to Cameron as it was in viewing the photos, and for a moment she thought that if photos like these had been in textbooks in medical school, maybe the diagnosis would have gotten a little more attention.
She was mesmerized by the photos. The first is of House and Wilson, dressed in Polo shirts and ridiculous khaki pants covered in colorful stains. It's hard to reconcile the man in the photo with the one she knows now- he is smiling, beaming really, as he holds a golf club in mid swing, aiming towards what appeared to be an orange or some other round fruit. Wilson himself seems to be laughing hysterically, with the stains on his pants evidence that perhaps he himself hit the first swing into the unfortunate fruit. Looking on the back of the photo, she found it dated September 6th, 1996, less than two months prior to the infarction.
The next photo is far different, and appears to have been taken immediately prior to the start the debridement surgery- the thigh is draped and prepped, yet instead of healthy pink flesh lying beneath the sterile blue drapes, the skin is thin and almost translucent. It gives off an almost bluish color, no doubt reflecting the muscle lying just below and appears leathery and bunched up in places, an unhealthy glow upon it.
The next is worse, an incision easily reaching lengths of 6 or 7 inches, the skin retracted back away, only to reveal tissue below that isn't dying but long dead, necrotic masses reaching to all ends of the incision.
The next page of photos is more of the same; different angles and stages of a surgery almost doomed from the start. It appears the deeper the surgeon went to try and get beyond the necrotic tissue, the more dead or compromised muscle he found.
The final page has only two images on it, and Cameron remained staring at them for several long minutes, not able to fully grasp what they told her. A fully retracted and finished debridement ready for closure, reaching impossibly long and ragged. Next, a completed surgical site, ready to be bandaged. Except that unless she knew that the limb in question was the thigh, she would not have been able to guess its orientation. The skin was sewn together carefully, with several Penrose drains incorporated to help assist the drainage which would almost certainly occur after such a cavernous gap was created. The sutures ran along the center of the depression, giving the thigh muscle the appearance of a valley with a great fissure at its center, slowly sloping upwards towards ground level.
She closed her eyes and pushed the images away, trying to reconcile what she knew to be true to what the photos were telling her. Digging deeper in the file, she found an affidavit signed by the surgeon who had performed the debridement, specifically describing the extent of compromised and excised tissue. Twice during the surgery, the doctor had stated, he had called the patients attending physician (who Cameron now knew to be Cuddy) and recommended they halt the debridement and perform an amputation.
Cameron didn't have to read the surgeons own opinion on prognosis to know that at the outcome of surgery, while the patients' life had been saved, the leg had, for all intents and purposes, been lost. She didn't have to see the exact number of nerves that the surgeon had observed damaged or had had to remove himself to know that excruciating pain and a useless limb were all this patient had to look forward to. She didn't have to read his estimated percentage numbers of recovery of any function of the limb to know that no leg this compromised could control a bend of the knee, or transmit useful nerve signals down to the foot, much less bear weight, with or without excruciating pain.
She was about to turn to the last page in the record when her heart suddenly turned to lead at the sound of a voice behind her.
"Now, if I knew that you were this pressed for something to do, I would have found you some more suitable reading material... preferably something without such a bad ending."
Cameron twirled around in her chair and stared up at him in horror, mouth agape. How he had been able to enter the office and sneak up behind her like that without her noticing she had no idea. Instantly she was both horrified and astonished and turned back to the file quickly, meaning to brush it closed and hide it in her desk and laugh off his accusation as paranoia.
House would have none of that. In two steps he was beside her, pulling the file out from under her, her hands going limp as the folder escaped her grasp. She looked up at him as he stood there next to her silently; looking at the very photos she had just been studying. He settled his weight onto his left leg and placed his cane across her desk, using his now free right hand to turn the page and continue his own perusal, as if the file in question where anyone but his. Still sitting at the desk, she found herself eye level with his hips, and for the first time she noticed the depression in the fabric of his pants as it followed the unnatural contour of his right leg. She moved her glance to the thin piece of well finished wood on her desk, trying to fathom how this seemingly inadequate support managed to make up for all that she knew to be missing.
Cameron felt his eyes upon her, and tried to come up with something to say, but it ended up coming out as mumbles instead. She finally summoned the courage to look back up at him, and to her surprise his expression was not the one of murderous rage; instead it is one she doesn't recognize on him- resignation perhaps? It was hard to say, as the look was gone almost as quickly as it was given, and he shut the folder.
Without a word, he grabbed his cane limped towards the door. Only then as she realized he was planning on leaving without saying a word, did Cameron get up to interrupt his exit.
"Dr. House." She was grateful she found her voice again. He paused; hand poised to push open the door, and then turned around to face her. She strode across the room towards him, trying to reconcile all she wanted to say with how little of it she knew he would hear. She stopped a few feet in front of him she said nothing for a moment, and then extended her right hand. Experience taught her not to wait for him to reciprocate, so instead she waited only a moment, then extended her hand further and grasped his own. He's so surprised by her action his cane clattered to the ground, but she ignored it, focused instead on keeping his gaze. Before he could come up with a remark or look away, she spoke. "It is an honor to know you, Dr. House." She gave his hand a quick shake then released it and bent down to retrieve the forgotten cane. Straightening back up, she handed it to him, and again caught his gaze before he broke eye contact. Later she would wonder if the slight nod of his head she thought she saw was just imagined, but for now she is content to watch him limp slowly back into his office, carelessly tossing the file into the `outgoing' box of paperwork on his desk before settling back into his chair.
He waits a good five minutes before daring to glance up into the conference room, not terribly surprised to find it empty, the lamp on her desk off, chair pushed in and her jacket missing from the hook in the corner. He allows himself a quick nod and tiny smile in disbelief before reaching down for his bag below the desk. He stuffs his ipod inside, shuts off the computer and stands up. He takes a few of his limping, cane-less half steps on his way to the door, then places the cane back on the ground after shutting off the lights to the office. It's only a little past three, but he has a feeling that today, no one will be bothering him for leaving a few hours early. Heading towards the elevator, he finds his usual rhythmic albeit halting gait, and for the first time in perhaps ever, takes just a little bit of pride in the fact that he's walking on his own, towards home.
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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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