SHE | alex karev

chapter six

"What are you even saying? It says right here: 'he talks to dead people, his family thinks he's dangerous, and they had him committed'," Billie read off the chart on Cristina's hands. "That's Psych, not Neuro."

"Man, didn't you go to med school?" the other girl sighed, annoyed.

"Yes, and unlike the correspondence school you attended-"

"Ooh! That would be Stanford, right?"

"-I learnt not to jump to conclusions," the doctor finished his sentence. "Sorry, ladies. We can't take him back until he's cleared."

"So you're dumping him on us?" Cristina kept arguing.

"He thinks his seizures are visions."

"Hello! They're not seizures. I'm psychic," the patient yelled from inside the room, where he sat on bed listening to the argument between the doctors.

"Of course you are, and I'm a chicken," Cristina replied, but when she noticed that the Psych doctor had left, she yelled. "Hey, genius!"

However, the man paid no mind, so the two interns sighed, glancing at each other and walking into the room.

"Okay, Mr. Duff. Now we're supposed to start your work-up. For all of our sakes," Billie smiled tightly at the patient.

"Work me up, work me down. I'm telling you, it's a waste of time," the patient chanted.

Billie laughed softly, using her flashlight to check the man's pupils at the same time that Cristina asked him to grip her fingers.

However, when Mr. Duff suddenly stayed completely still with his jaw clenched and his pupils beginning to fully dilate, Billie arched an eyebrow.

"Hey, Cristina..."

"Mr. Duff, are you okay?" she shook the man's shoulders in order to wake him up from his trance.

After a second, the man finally snapped back to reality, humming and looking at the two girls before he spoke. "Someone... someone's gonna check out. Bye-bye."

Cristina let out a noisy huff.

"The man is nuts."

"I'm dizzy, not deaf, lady. And I'm telling you, someone on the fourth floor is gonna die," he said, so sure of herself that Billie's eyebrows shot up.

However, when they heard the words 'code blue, fourth floor' being spoken through the PA, the two girls looked at each other with confused, yet slightly surprised expressions. Mr. Duff smiled matter-of-factly.

The two girls immediately rushed out of the room.

☆

"A little botox would do wonders for all those frown lines," Mr. Duff said to Cristina, earning a sincere chuckle from Billie.

"Okay, shut up," the former answered in an evident bad mood, since she still thought this case was a waste of time.

"Are you allowed to talk to me like that?" he asked, rubbing his temples and simply receiving a hiss from the intern as a response. He laughed. "God, you're hot... in a Mrs. Livingston kinda way."

"Okay, Mr. Duff, see here?" Billie approached the patient, showing him the EEG scan. "These are spikes in your temporal lobe. It means you have epilepsy. Not visions, seizures."

"You think I'm epileptic? That is so not right," he scoffed.

"Well, an EEG technically and literally looks into your brain, so it's not me, it's science," Billie smiled innocently.