Work Text:
You're golfing when it happens. You don't even like golfing all that much but you like to move and feel your body in the air and golfing is easy and solitary. You're golfing with your girlfriend when the pain starts, like hot knives under your skin, like your nerves are being slit open along the seams, like if you looked down your leg would be nothing but scorch marks and ash. You hit the ground and she asks if you're okay, and you can't breathe deeply enough to give her a coherent answer.
"Okay, okay, we'll fix this," she says, more to herself than to you, and she kneels down next to you, looking deep into your eyes. You think she must see the fear that your leg is falling to pieces under you, because she presses a hand to your forehead and tells you she's going to get a golf cart.
By the time you make it to an exam room at the hospital, you're holding screams back with nothing but your teeth. The doctor looks at you and muses, but you're in too much pain for him to actually diagnose anything, he says. He ponders whether he can give you something, anything, and you're grabbing the needle from his hand before you can think. The bite of it entering your leg is nothing compared to the way your leg must be splitting in half, and when you press the plunger in, you can feel your muscles begin to unclench in anticipation of the sweetness of painkillers. The doctor writes you a prescription for antibiotics and then kicks you out, calls you an addict, and you know who he is but in the haze of pain and drugs you can't quite place him. Your girlfriend isn't with you and you can't remember why, but you make it home somehow.
You come in to work the next day, because you don't miss shifts. You'd rather come in and spend the day bitching than spend the day at home. You feel like you're dying. You think you're dying. Most of the day is spent in a haze but when you see your boss she tells you to stop fucking around and do your job. You pretend you're okay and you think maybe you're somewhat successful, because no one does anything more than give you weird looks.
The day after, you're useless. Two days of screaming pain have frayed your nerves and surely you're not even a real person anymore. You're running on nothing but adrenaline and fear and you're incapable of focusing on anything other than the pain splintering through your thigh and burning its way into your spine. Your boss tries to send you home, but she doesn't trust you to drive and she can't stand to watch you try and fail to limp out to the car. She sends you to the clinic to get checked out - your employees are busy trying to save the patient you can't think enough to diagnose. The same doctor from two days before sees you. He tells you he can't give you any medication until you consent to a urine test and it's not until the catheter is fighting its way into your urethra that you realize something is very wrong.
You're a doctor, you know the drill. Urine is yellow, blood is red, the fluid draining through your catheter is brown. Still, they send you home. They prescribe rest and ice and tell you the brown urine was a fluke. Except it doesn't get better.
You go into the hospital the next day hellbent on being diagnosed with something. Something is wrong, even if you can't see it. You tell your boss you need an MRI. She asks you why you'd need that. You tell her that dying muscle leaks myoglobin, hence the brown piss, and you are pretty sure the muscle in your thigh is decaying, dying, rotting away inside you. She agrees, just to placate you. You can tell. They all think you're faking, overexaggerating, fiending for pills. The inside of the MRI machine could collapse in on you right now and you'd be okay with it.
"We found a problem," she tells you, and you scoff.
"No fucking shit, you found a problem."
"The muscle is dying. It's dead, House. We need to remove it ASAP."
"You aren't taking my leg," you tell her. "It's mine. I've had it for as long as I can remember." She shakes her head at you.
"Do you really care more about your leg than your life?" You close your eyes. You're on a heavy morphine drip that's not working very well. You tell her to bypass the damaged tissue and hope that it'll heal.
The pain increases. The surgery is successful, or at least as successful as it could be, given the circumstances. You want to die or maybe you want to kill someone else. God or your girlfriend or your boss or someone. Your heart stops beating and they get it started back up again. The morphine is as high as it can be and none of it helps. You want someone, anyone, you want to die and not have to deal anymore. As you scream from between gritted teeth, it hits you: if they put you out you can survive this. Your heart will hold out and you won't have to deal with the pain and you can survive.
They agree, hesitantly, and you're free. As you go under, your girlfriend apologizes, but the cool relief of unconsciousness is drawing you under. For what feels like an eternity or maybe a couple seconds, nothing hurts. Nothing hurts and you think maybe you'll never feel that again.
And then you wake up. And something is wrong. And you realize, as you touch the stitched together hole in your leg where your thigh used to be, you were right. You'll never be okay again.