Inquiry: Day Eight, 3 p.m. - Dr. Lisa Cuddy 1
Title: InquiryAuthor: zeppomarx
Characters: All the usual suspects, plus more.
Summary: When a panel is convened to review the facts of Gregory House’s life, his fellows (past and present), colleagues, patients and friends are called to testify.
Thanks: To Brigid45, for her infinite wisdom and advice.
Warnings, etc.: Possible character death.
Disclaimers: Don't own House or any of the show's characters. If I did, things might have gone a little differently.
Chapter Summary: Testimony of Dr. Lisa Cuddy 1
Day Eight, 3 p.m.
Lisa Cuddy was a hostile witness. A very hostile witness. She entered the room defiantly, her heels sharply clacking noisily against the wood floor. With her jaw set in irritation and her eyes narrowed almost to slits, she settled herself behind the small table, her hands clasped tightly in front of her, her entire body angular and fraught with tension.
“State your name.”
“Dr. Lisa Cuddy.” In her own ears, her voice sounded brittle and hard, her words clipped.
“What is your current job title, Dr. Cuddy?”
“I am the chief administrator at Philadelphia Mercy Hospital, former dean of medicine and chief administrator at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital.”
“Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions, Dr. Cuddy.”
Cuddy sat stiffly in the hard wooden chair facing the panel. “I don’t really see the necessity for this hearing, or for me to be present. I have professional obligations to attend to. And I really resent your bringing my daughter into this.”
“I understand you are an unwilling witness here, but we’ll get through this as quickly as we can.”
“I’d appreciate it,” she said, pressing her lips together into a thin line.
“Tell us when you first met Gregory House.”
“We met at the University of Michigan.” Cuddy was determined to keep her statements as brief and to the point as she could, hoping she could get out of here quickly. For years, she’d gotten mad at House, but then her attraction to him would win out, and she’d forgive him anything. But ever since he drove that car into her dining room, she’d been unable to get past her fury, unable to remember what had attracted her to him in the first place.
“What was your relationship with him at that time?”
“He was a few years ahead of me. We had a one-night stand. Then he left school abruptly, and I didn’t see him again until I was at Princeton-Plainsboro.”
“When did you next meet him?”
“At the time of his leg injury. I became his primary physician.” Almost unwillingly, Cuddy remembered that moment, that horrible moment when she realized the man screaming in sheer agony before her was the same man she’d followed around starry-eyed at U-M, the one she audited that endocrinology course for. When she recognized him, she had nearly become physically ill.
“Tell us about that.”
“He had been admitted with severe leg pain, which turned out to be a blood clot that eventually led to muscle cell death.” It couldn’t be the same man, could it? she remembered thinking. That athletic, graceful guy, who strode arrogantly around the campus, a flock of panting undergraduate females in his wake, Lisa Cuddy one of the crowd.
“Who diagnosed the cause of his pain? Was that you?”
“No. After he had an MRI, he and the doctor on staff had both diagnosed it. I wasn’t brought in until his injury had been left untreated for three or four days.”
“And what was your recommended treatment?”
“I felt that amputation of his right leg was the only reasonable course of action.”
“Did Dr. House agree with your assessment?”
“No, he did not. He insisted on a bypass, which increased his pain even further, causing a cardiac arrest, and then chose to be put into a medically induced coma, which he felt might allow him to sleep through the worst of the pain. He believed the coma presented the most positive possible outcome -- that he might come out the other side in the best shape that way.”
“But that’s not what you did, is it, Dr. Cuddy? What did you do instead?”
“I ordered a debridement procedure to eliminate the dead tissue.”
“Was that conducted at Dr. House’s request?”
“No. I suggested the procedure to Dr. House’s medical proxy, Stacy Lockhart. She approved the debridement.”
“What was Dr. House’s reaction to this suggestion?”
“He was not present during the conversation with Ms. Lockhart.”
“So he was not given the opportunity to make an informed decision about his own treatment?”
“No, he was not.” Cuddy had always feared that moment in her medical career would come back to haunt her, and now it seemed as if it had.
“When in the process was the debridement performed?”
“After he was in the medically induced coma.”
“What was his reaction when he awoke?”
“He was angry, and felt betrayed by Ms. Lockhart. They broke up a few months later, as I understand it.”
Cuddy remembered telling Stacy that the debridement held the possible risk of reperfusion injury… and that’s exactly what had happened, leaving Gregory House in permanent, excruciating pain. Although she hadn’t thought about it in years, she had wondered -- dreamed, even -- at the time whether she had made the right call, whether she should have just trusted the judgment of the patient, who also happened to be the greatest medical mind she’d ever known. Was it the original blood clot, untreated for days, that left him in such pain, or was it her own medical actions, done behind his back, that had turned that charismatic, brilliant, funny man into the cantankerous malcontent he had since become?
“You say he felt betrayed by Ms. Lockhart. Did he seem to feel betrayed by you as well? You had ordered the procedure, after all, and the two of you had a previous history.”
“No. He never held it against me.” He hadn’t, had he? Despite herself, Cuddy had to acknowledge that he certainly had every reason to feel as betrayed by her as he had by Stacy… and yet, he had never said a word against her about it.
“Once you became his physician, did it concern you, ethically, that you were treating someone you had once been involved with… or that you did not include Dr. House in the discussions of this possible treatment?”
“Not particularly. I felt it was the best chance to save his life.” Boy, that sounded conceited, she thought. And I have always been the one who insisted on informed consent.
“You are an endocrinologist, are you not? This was not your area of expertise.”
“Correct.”
Fortunately, the panel left it at that. “Let’s move ahead a few years. Under what circumstances did you hire Dr. House?”
“That happened about a year after his surgery. I had heard that Dr. House was no longer working, that he was still suffering a great deal of pain.”
“Heard from whom?”
“His friend, Dr. James Wilson.” Wilson, who was on the fast track to becoming PPTH’s youngest-ever head of the Oncology Department, had lunch with Cuddy about once a week, depending on their respective schedules. When they got together, he would give her an update on House’s progress (if any), never really aware she had a personal investment in House -- not just because he had been her patient, but also because of their long-ago tryst at U-M. Every week, she found herself barely able to eat, listening to Wilson talk about House’s pain, his problems with mobility, his depression, his anger, and every week she found herself wondering if she had done this to the man, if it was her own actions that had changed him so much.
“And this pain -- was it in direct correlation to the procedure you had ordered for Dr. House when he was under your care?”
“Possibly.” Who was she kidding? Of course, it was in direct correlation… or at least part of it was. She’d never know for sure, of course, how much of his pain was from the original injury, ultimately untreated for four days, and how much of the responsibility came back to her and her choices.
“Possibly?” repeated the chairman. “From what we can see on the scans, given how much muscle and nerve were removed in the debridement, leaving nerve endings exposed, it seems more than possible. Please tell us how you came to create the first-ever department of diagnostics, and how you came to hire Dr. House as a tenured faculty member to head it up.”
Back onto safe ground. “I knew about Dr. House’s reputation -- both good and bad -- and went to our board of directors about setting up the department.” Cuddy was relieved to move away from the topic of her ethical lapse in judgment over House’s surgery. Maybe things would go smoother from here on out.
“What prompted your decision to take this chance on Dr. House, whom I understand, did not have the best employment record prior to his injury?”
“It was part of my mission to find ways to improve the hospital’s standing in the medical community, and I felt that creating this department was an excellent opportunity in that direction.” Although true, that certainly wasn’t the whole story. She knew that how she (and the other doctors) had treated House medically had put the hospital in danger of a major medical malpractice lawsuit, and creating the department for him was her way of taking preemptive action to avoid that very real possibility.
“Were there any additional motivating factors, Dr. Cuddy? Please keep in mind that we have already spoken with others about how Dr. House came to be hired.”
Cuddy gritted her teeth. “I… I must confess that I was concerned about the possibility of a malpractice lawsuit, based on Dr. House’s treatment the previous year.” Uh-oh, she thought, as she realized this panel was sharp enough to figure out her motivations in bringing House on board.
“A malpractice lawsuit against the hospital, or against you personally?”
Cuddy did not want to answer this question, but she felt she had no choice. “Both,” she said, reluctantly, through her teeth.
“Had he suggested he might be considering a malpractice lawsuit?”
“Not to me, no. If he was considering a suit, I wasn’t aware of it.” That was true enough. Of course, she hadn’t talked to him directly since the debridement surgery, and she’d managed to get Wilson to change the subject every time it seemed to be headed that way in their weekly lunches. Despite the fact that she really wanted to know if House was planning to sue, she also didn’t want to have to admit to foreknowledge of it.
“But you were concerned that it might be a possibility?”
“Yes, I suppose I was.” From the moment she had gone against his express wishes, she’d known the legal and ethical consequences of her actions. She’d spent that first year just waiting for the boom to fall. Every mail delivery, she was sure, would bring a white envelope with the name of some malpractice law firm in the upper left-hand corner. But, somehow, she’d been lucky; it had never happened. Then she got her brilliant idea to hire House -- essentially buying him off with a job, a job so tantalizing he couldn’t possibly turn it down -- and thereby make sure that likelihood of a lawsuit wouldn’t keep dangling over her like the pendulum in the Poe story.
“What was the effect on the hospital’s reputation as a result of having Dr. House on staff?”
At this point in her life, with the image of her demolished dining room still fresh in her mind, Cuddy hated having to admit that anything positive had come from her decision to hire House, but she couldn’t avoid the reality of the situation, much as she might have wanted to. “The hospital’s reputation improved,” she said, succinctly.
“How much did it improve?”
Dammit. “A lot. It took us from being a small, regional hospital to a world-class institution.”
“So, I assume that confirmed for you that you had made the right decision in hiring Dr. House.”
“Yes, it did.” Although, right this minute, she wish she’d never laid eyes on the man.
“And did this increased reputation include increased donations?”
“Yes.”
“By how much?”
“Probably ten-fold in the first two years.” Somehow, fundraising, which had always been like pulling teeth, had abruptly become simple. Just mention House’s name, pull out a few press announcements, and the money poured in.
“And after the first two years?”
“More.”
“How much money in donations are we talking about here, Dr. Cuddy?”
“I don’t have the exact figures handy, but I would say we received in the neighborhood of an additional $100 million per year at the beginning. More later on.”
“We understand that Dr. House was uninterested in publicity for his successes, but we have here a number of PPTH press release giving him credit for saving the lives of some pretty well-known people.” The panel chair held out a hefty stack of papers. “Who arranged for those releases to be written and distributed?”
“I did.” She’d had no problem allowing the hospital to get credit for House’s achievements, even though the man had obstinately refused to give press conferences or do interviews.
“So would you say the hospital’s reputation benefitted from having him on board?”
“Yes, I suppose I would.” No question about it, but she was damned if she’d acknowledge that.
“And your personal reputation, by extension, would also have benefitted. Would that be true?”
“Yes.” It certainly was true, which now galled her no end. Before she hired House, she’d be left on hold or have to leave a message if she called the AMA or another hospital. After hiring House, whenever she placed a call, the person on the other end picked up immediately upon hearing her name. The best publications regularly solicited articles from her, and she was entreated to be the keynote speaker at medical administration conferences. Yes, indeed, her reputation had benefitted.
“And would you say that his team members also benefitted from working for Dr. House… that their standing in the international medical community was raised?”
“Yes. They often wrote up Dr. House’s cases for highly regarded medical journals.”
“Thank you. Would you say that Dr. House was paid commensurate with his value to the hospital?”
The question took Cuddy by surprise. “I felt he was paid appropriately.” She saw a couple of the panel members sift through the papers in front of them, and began to feel a bit uneasy about where this line of questioning might be going. She felt her heart sink. Perhaps she hadn’t been as clever as she’d thought when she had publicly and repeatedly mentioned getting him for a song.
“According to our records, Dr. House was paid considerably less than the statewide standard for a specialist or a department head. In addition, his salary was far below that of your other department heads. Would you care to explain this discrepancy?”
How the hell am I going to handle this? she wondered, her anxiety level ratcheting up a notch. Dealing with things head on was always her first option, so head on it would be. “He had a troublesome job history,” she began, sounding more confident than she felt, “and he was known to be difficult to work with, so it seemed reasonable that he should be compensated accordingly.”
The reality, if she was brutally honest with herself, was that she’d played him. After talking to Wilson every week, she’d realized House was particularly vulnerable at the point where she’d come up with her brilliant idea to create the department for him. During their salary negotiations, in order to manipulate House into settling for a much lower salary than he was worth, she had continually brought up his erratic job history and the fact that he hadn’t worked for nearly a year, undermining his already damaged confidence. At the time, she hadn’t felt too bad about it -- it was simply business, after all, and it had saved the hospital a few million over the years -- and yet, it wasn’t particularly nice of her to take advantage of House that way. Oh, well. She wasn’t paid to be nice. She was paid to make the best possible deal for the hospital. And she certainly had done that.
“And yet,” said the chairman, “he was bringing into your hospital $100 million or more a year, not to mention a lot of extremely positive publicity.”
“He was willing to accept the salary I offered. As a businesswoman, why would I offer to pay more under those circumstances?” Yes, she had taken advantage of him, but he’d accepted it. So who was the smart one?
“Once Dr. House was on staff, what accommodations did you make for his disability?”
“I didn’t feel he needed any.” Oh, crap, she thought, caught off guard by the change in topic. Did I say that?
“I beg your pardon, Dr. Cuddy, but surely you arranged for him to have a handicapped parking space.”
“Well, yes, but that was obvious. He was still having trouble getting around, so it seemed only right.” She refrained from mentioning that House had needed to fight with her just to get that parking space, or that she’d played games with him later on, giving his space away to another disabled employee and thereby forcing him to hobble around an icy parking lot just to get in the building. It was only because she’d had so much trouble picturing as disabled the formerly athletic House from med school that she’d slipped up on the original handicapped parking space. The second time, she remembered, she’d just seen it as one of their ongoing tit-for-tat games.
“Any other accommodations? Did he have in-house medical treatment or pain management care? Days off when his pain was unmanageable? Rest breaks? Ergonomic furniture? Anything?”
“I was not aware of other accommodations.” It was only a few months after she’d been promoted to run the hospital that she’d convinced the board to allow her to make the offer to House. While getting adjusted to her new position, she’d had a lot on her plate… and she was sure she could come up with any number of other perfectly reasonable excuses for this particular lapse. After all, she hadn’t even been up to date yet on the hospital’s rules and regulations when House came on board.
The woman at the far end of the table interrupted immediately. “Not aware of any? Really, Dr. Cuddy? Whose responsibility should it have been to support and protect the man whose reputation increased the standing of your hospital such that it became, almost overnight, a world-class institution, and brought in the majority of donations to the hospital? Yours... or his own? The doctor or the patient? The supervisor or the employee?”
Defensive in the face of the woman’s accusations, Cuddy didn’t answer, just tightened her jaw even further. And besides, what could she say? She just hadn’t been able to get used to thinking of Gregory House as an invalid. That was her only real excuse. And maybe this kind of lapse was exactly why House always claimed it was dangerous to get too close to a patient, to let your emotions rule when it really ought to be your head that was in charge.
Fortunately for her, the panel chair asked the next question: “Explain your management technique in dealing with Dr. House, and how it might have differed from the way you managed other department heads.”
Cuddy felt on safer ground with this question. “Dr. House needed constant supervision. He was a loose cannon, and I had to stay on top of things, just to get him to do his job and not go off half-cocked with one of his insane treatment ideas. My other department heads were more responsible.”
“What made you think this kind of supervision was necessary?”
Images of House sleeping in the clinic or watching TV or playing games flew in rapid succession through her mind. “I would often find him asleep in his office or an exam room. He was constantly playing on his computer, or fooling around with toys. He avoided work like the plague, so I felt he needed closer watching.”
“Interesting. Is it possible that he was resting because of pain in his leg, or because he had terrible insomnia caused by that pain? Or is it possible that what you perceived as ‘playing’ was actually part of the creative process?”
“No,” she said, sure of herself. “The man was simply lazy.” Was he? Her mind again flashed back to the man she’d known in Michigan. Yes, he liked to play games back then, but he was always working, always thinking. Would she have described that man as lazy? If she was being honest with herself, Cuddy would have to say no, she wouldn’t have described that man as lazy. So what had changed? Had it been the whole concept of professional work that bothered him, or maybe his reaction to authority figures (which now included her), or was it a result of the pain, the insomnia… or just part and parcel of the creative process… the kinds of things the chairman of the panel had just mentioned… and about which she’d never given any particular thought.
“Okay…” She saw panel members making notations on their yellow pads. “Describe his duties.”
“He was supposed to take cases on a regular basis -- usually only one at a time, because of the nature of his work, although I was happy when he took more than one. He was also expected to publish, as is usually the case with someone in an academic institution like Princeton… he needed to teach the occasional course or guest lecture, and he was also required to work in the free clinic several hours per week. ”
The next question took her by surprise. “And why, may I ask, was someone of Dr. House’s caliber working in your clinic?”
“All the doctors on staff were responsible for clinic hours.” Where was this going? She hadn’t expected House to do anything that wasn’t also required by all her other doctors.
“Even if their talents suggested that they could be better used elsewhere?”
“It was part of their contract. Besides, House got behind on his clinic hours… by several years, in fact.” Haranguing House into doing his clinic hours had been at the top of her to-do list for years.
“What did working in the clinic entail?”
“He was expected to put in a minimum of five hours per week. He saw patients and recommended treatment, writing prescriptions, etc.”
“Did this involve a lot of walking or standing?”
“Sometimes.” Oh. Now she knew where this was going, and she felt that sinking feeling return to her midsection.
“You’re saying you honestly believe that it was an appropriate use of Dr. House’s time and skills to have him spend time on his feet dealing with patients who could just as easily have been treated by a first-year resident?”
“Well, when you put it that way…”
“I do. And yet, according to the records, Dr. House was unable to take on more than a small percentage of the diagnostic cases that were referred to him. As a result, many of those patients who were never seen by him ultimately died. Did it never occur to you that, with his pain issues and his unique medical gift, perhaps he should be absolved of his clinic debt and encouraged to take more diagnostic cases instead?”
Cuddy’s breath caught. Had her decision to make House work in the clinic cost lives? Her mind circled around the idea, but she didn’t want to think about the implications of what they were saying. In fact, she decided, she simply wouldn’t think about it. Don’t back down. You got where you are by being strong. Don’t admit failure; bully your way through if you have to. “No. It did not,” she said. “It was part of his contract, and it was my job to enforce that contract.”
“So you never considered altering his contract in any way because of his disability?”
“Never.” At least that part was true. She had dogmatically stuck to the terms of House’s original contract the entire time she was at PPTH. He annoyed her so much with their constant wrangling about clinic duty that she’d figured he deserved any additional physical pain it caused him… after all, he was causing her mental pain by being such an ass about it.
“Uh-huh. Okay. Were there ever occasions when you used clinic duty as a disciplinary tool for Dr. House?”
“I might have,” she answered, wondering where that question was coming from, but growing increasingly leery about the focus of the panel’s questions and how they were forcing her to deal with things she’d either never considered or had shied away from.
The chairman of the panel flipped through the papers in front of him. “Could you tell us about the time Dr. House was asked to consult for the CIA?”
Suddenly, Cuddy’s emotions flared up, and she found herself annoyed. “He… he never… that never happened. It was just a bullshit story he made up so he could skip out of doing his work.”
“Not according to this letter from Dr. Samira Terzi, formerly of the CIA and currently with the FBI,” said the man in front of her, holding up a letter. Even from a distance, Cuddy recognized government letterhead. Oh, no, she thought. This is really not good.
The chairman continued. “She says she requested Dr. House’s services to aid a seriously ill CIA agent, and sent a government helicopter to pick him up.”
Cuddy was flabbergasted, to say the least. “I… I don’t know what to say. I thought he was scamming me.”
“Clearly he wasn’t. Did Dr. House tell you he’d been doing work for the CIA?”
“Well, yes… but I didn’t believe him.” He was always yanking her chain, always lying, always being such an incredible jerk. Why should she have believed him?
“Why didn’t you believe him?”
“It was such an outrageous story, I knew it couldn’t be true.”
“And yet it was true,” said the chairman. “Did you, or did you not, assign him additional clinic hours at that time?”
“I did… but again, I was sure he hadn’t actually been working for the CIA. Why would I think that was true?”
“Did you attempt to confirm his story?” Yet again, Cuddy realized she’d overlooked the obvious. She’d been so damned sure he was making it up -- it was such an unlikely tale -- that it had never even dawned on her to check his story.
“No, I did not.” Based on her pervious experience with him, she had assumed it was a dodge. How was she supposed to know the CIA had actually sent a helicopter for him?
But had it really been all that unlikely? she wondered. Certainly, with House’s international reputation, it was not outside the bounds of reason that the CIA might have sent for him on a troublesome medical issue. Thinking back on it, she did remember hearing some of her staff complain about loud noises on the roof… could that have been a helicopter? And, of course, there were House’s prospective fellows, who had been overheard in the cafeteria commenting about a strange man who had appeared in their midst that day, and claiming that, shortly thereafter, House had disappeared for several hours.
“Was it common for you to ‘punish’ Dr. House by assigning him additional clinic hours?”
“I guess I wouldn’t say it was common, necessarily, but it did happen on occasion.” Cuddy felt distinctly uncomfortable with the realization that she had been so positive the CIA story couldn’t be true that she hadn’t even done due diligence to confirm his story. The accusation that she punished House with clinic duty -- while true -- didn’t make her feel any more at ease, especially with what they’d pointed out about clinic duty aggravating his leg pain. Visions of ADA violation fines danced in her head.
Damn him! At times, he was like the Boy Who Cried Wolf. He lied and misbehaved so often that she never even considered believing him most of the time. How many other times had he told her the truth and she hadn’t believed him? And which came first -- his lying or her disbelieving? Had he started lying to her because she hadn’t believed him when he told the truth, or had he actually been lying all along, setting her up to distrust him. Or, worse yet, had he started lying because he hadn’t wanted to admit that his disability made things more difficult for him, so he made up stories to keep that from being the focus. Chicken or egg? How many times had she given him extra clinic duty when, with a little bit of research -- or consideration for his disability - she might have realized he didn’t deserve it?
Cuddy was thankful when the chairman changed topics. “Dr. Foreman has told us that at one point, you made him Dr. House’s second in command, but this promotion was not reflected in the documents we received. Was he correct?”
“Yes.”
“Why was this not made official?”
It was at this point Cuddy resigned herself to answering the panel’s questions fully. Obviously, they weren’t going to shy away from difficult subjects, and it was not in her self-interest to remain belligerent throughout the proceedings. “I didn’t see the need to… Dr. Foreman and I had a handshake agreement. He got a substantial raise, and I got someone to help control Dr. House’s behavior.”
“Was Dr. Foreman, in fact, able to control Dr. House’s behavior?”
“Actually, it didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped. House generally ignored Dr. Foreman -- unless Eric came to me with a specific problem, in which case I would intervene.” As the topic turned away from House and toward her interactions with Foreman, Cuddy felt herself begin to unwind just a little bit.
“So Dr. Foreman became a high-priced tattletale?”
“I guess you could see it that way. It was still worth it to me to have someone on House’s team keeping me abreast of what was happening.”
“Did you take this unusual step because you didn’t trust Dr. House on some level?”
Had she trusted House? In fact, no, she hadn’t trusted him, which brought her thoughts dangerously close once again to the whole topic of clinic duty and House’s lying. “My past experience with him was that he sometimes took extreme measures during the diagnostic process and wouldn’t inform me first. With Dr. Foreman reporting to me regularly, I had a heads up when House was about to do an end run around me.”
The woman at the end of the table -- the same woman who had asked Wilson such troubling questions -- again picked up the questioning. “When Dr. House used such radical measure, what was the result? Did those approaches lead to the correct diagnosis, even if they seemed bizarre at the time?”
“Most of the time, House eventually came up with the right answer,” she admitted, “and often those bizarre approaches did lead… eventually… to a diagnosis and treatment. However, there were also times when his approach endangered the patient along the way, or when an alternative might be less invasive. That was when I would intervene.”
“Given your own medical background, which was endocrinology, did you actually have the expertise to determine when Dr. House’s methods were the correct ones or not?”
Cuddy did not like this question -- it reminded her far too much of the way House used to belittle her relative lack of hands-on medical experience. Still, she’d made up her mind to go through with this, so on she went. “Not always. But his team was there as a check-and-balance system for him, and generally, if he suggested something that seemed completely outrageous to me, or something that was financially prohibitive, I could get feedback from his team before he went too far with it. Of course, once Dr. Foreman was promoted, that became easier.”
“As for these outrageous suggestions, isn’t it true that they contributed to his diagnostic process, part of what made him one of the greatest medical minds of our time?”
“I guess maybe they did. He still needed supervision, however.”
The panel chair resumed questioning. “Good point. You mentioned finances, Dr. Cuddy. It sounds to me as if some of these steps along the way to finding a diagnosis could be pretty expensive. Is that true?”
This was safe ground, Cuddy thought. “House paid no attention to the financial concerns of the hospital or the insurance reimbursement to us. If he decided he wanted to do something, he was going to try it, and God help us all if we got in his way. It was my job to stay on top of those things… and try not to compromise patient care at the same time.”
“How did these expensive tests balance out with the donations his department brought into the hospital?”
“In our annual budgeting process, we always allotted Diagnostics enough money to cover such things, and the donations far outweighed those costs. Of course, the cost per patient was often much higher than for any other department, except perhaps oncology. But when he saved the life of the man who went on to become President of the United States, or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, then money had very little relative value.”
“Well put, Dr. Cuddy. Thank you for explaining things so clearly. Why don’t we adjourn for today, and reconvene tomorrow morning at nine?”
That wasn’t so bad, thought Cuddy, as she stared at her reflection in the ladies’ room mirror before leaving the building. But she did find herself cringing as she thought about the debridement questions. She’d always been afraid of repercussions for the way she’d gone behind House’s back on that, and that fear had been rekindled this afternoon.
Day Nine, 9 a.m. - Dr. Lisa Cuddy 2