Verso

Chapter Twelve- Diagnostics with Professor House

Chapter Twelve- Diagnostics with Professor House

Across the carpark of Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, Greg House limped the short distance between his car and the main entrance. The relentless heat that had persisted all week had refused to let up. So much so that he had forgone his usual morning coffee in favour of an iced tropical beverage he'd picked up en-route to work; it was already half melted. Stepping inside, the first thing he noticed was that the air-conditioning had been repaired overnight and thus made the building a more attractive prospect than the outside world. He'd wager the clinic would be packed full of people pretending to have heat stroke, but in reality just wanting to escape the sun's continual bombardment.

Striding across the ground floor, he reached the elevator and rode it up to the fourth. When he passed the door to Wilson's office he made a mental note to find some way of pranking him should he get a free moment. Through the windows of his outer office he could see that his team had already gathered. The files in front of them suggested that they had successfully done his bidding and put Kiddo through the battery of tests. Opening the door, he stepped inside and took up his seat at the head of the table. He tossed a pair of vicodin from the bottle in his pocket and helped himself to a donut from the box in the centre of the table before acknowledging that he'd even noticed his team were present.

"Good morning class," he said before taking a bite out of the donut. "I hope you all did your homework." He made a hand gesture that indicated he wanted a copy of the test results.

Chase raised his eyebrows in a sort of gesture that told House they had been discussing how best to give him the results. He slid the now slightly fuller file across to House.

"We did, but you're not going to like it, all the bloodwork came back clean. The rapid strep test was negative and the lung function test was normal." He sat back and sipped from his own coffee cup and loosened his tie.

"Hey, who said I was against negative test results. In fact, the Michelson-Morley experiment produced one of the most famous and biggest theory shattering null-results of all time." He waited to see if any of his students had done their physics lessons.

Ignoring House, Foreman added the MRI scans to the top of the file. He adopted his neurologist tone, "there's evidence of a significant head injury, a small hairline fracture would have been my bet. She would have been ill, possibly vomiting and had a major headache, possibly some visual disturbance too, but it's healed and wouldn't explain anything current."

House shook his head in disappointment. "Ten points from Gryffindor," he declared, pulling the MRI scan out of the second file and holding it up to the light. He squinted at it in an unimpressed sort of way.

"Sorry professor Snape. Looks like she's healthy," Chase said reaching for a donut.

Cameron, the one who had actually run all the tests by herself, had removed her lab coat and was in the process of trying to open the window. It appeared that while the majority of the hospital's air conditioning had been repaired, the one in House's office was still woefully neglected. "Her fever is down. Breathing normal." She sat down and checked her pager. "Which is more than I can say for my other patient who took another attack this morning."

House reached out with his cane and hooked the box of donuts out of Chase's reach. "While Dr House doesn't mind negative test results, Professor Snape doesn't reward students that don't bring something meaningful to the table," he paused for a moment, feigning contemplation. "In fact, he has a tendency to punish those not in his House. Detention, Dr Chase... and by detention I mean you just earned yourself three of my clinic hours for the week."