Greg House may be a selfish, cynical bastard, half-crippled and well into the throws of middle-age but he was, after all, a man. So it came as no surprise to Lisa Cuddy that he was the first medical attendant to pick up the call for the hospital's surprise Jane Doe. The rapping of his cane against the tile floor at the opposite end of the hall heralded his arrival at a faster pace than usual -— if only he responded to all of his medical calls with this much exuberance! —- and as she waited for him to round the corner, she braced herself. She had the medical chart in hand, and as he came to claim it with his usual smug look of bemusement, she tried to convince herself that just for once he might actually be here out of genuine, professional interest. For the patient, for God's sake!

Hah!

"…completely naked! She just wandered in. No wallet, no identification, nothing to say where she's come from and now she's made an absolute wreck of my examination room. We've notified the police and she'll be put on the missing persons' report, but until then she's been remanded to our care."

The look Cuddy exchanged with her chief diagnostician and the quirked-brow, mischievous smirk he returned clearly relayed that their ideas of "care" were two completely different things. Nevertheless, Dr. Cuddy stepped aside and kept her thoughts to herself as her colleague hoisted himself to the exam room door and threw it open with his typical degree of sensitivity.

The small, two-person examination room was in complete disarray. A jar of tongue depressors had been unceremoniously upended, its contents relocated to a surgical tray in the corner and piled one on top of the other into a tilting tower of amazing height. An entire box of bandages appeared to have been unraveled and used as streamers, draped from the overhead lamp and trailing across the floor at his feet.

And there, perched on the exam table in the middle of the melee, was a petite young red-head intent on sticking a pen light down the front of her hospital gown and admiring the shadows it cast against the thin fabric. Perched atop her head was an upside-down bedpan, the pale pink vessel almost opaque in opposition with the patient's shock of vibrantly rubicund hair.

As he walked cautiously across the threshold, the girl threw herself from the table with a squeal of delight and began to gesture wildly at the blood-pressure monitor strapped to the wall. As she made to pull the arm sleeve from its hook, the back of her hospital gown flung itself out of place and afforded Dr. House with a gratuitous view of a bare, pale and, in his opinion, finely-crafted ass.

"There is a god," he muttered, the tip of his cane reaching behind him to shut the exam room door on an exasperated Cuddy who, as the door swung closed with a particularly loud thud, found the palm of her right hand making violent contact with her forehead.