Watching House

Well it seems that I’m not the only one that feels that the producers of House took it too far when they gave Dr. House urinary retention problems.

Of course Mary McNamara, one of the L.A. Times Show Tracker writers didn’t like House having to catheterize himself, but it was for different reasons than my own.

She thought the fact that they showed a good portion of the self catheterization procedure barbaric where I just found it inane and medically inaccurate.

Scenes that begin with a star pants-down on the john are never a good sign, but I figured they’d never really go through with it. Not even when House begins lubing up the tube (gross enough) and gulping his pills. We get the message — desperate junkie requires desperate measures. Surely the camera is going to cut away now … now…. now … holy mother of … these people are crazy.

My personal beef with his urinary retention problems and subsequent self catheterization was that it went on too long. As I said in an earlier post his bladder surely would have burst and his kidneys would have had major problems. He probably would have been on his way towards a nice infection too.

If they had portrayed him going through his “I can’t pee” problem with a pale face, sweats and possibly fevers, oh and a swollen abdomen it might have been much more believable.

As for catheterizing himself, well I won’t go into the method used on a man, but that lubricant that he slathered all over the cath tube wasn’t supposed to go there!

The lubricant that nurses use when they catheterize a male, if they are being nice of course, contains lidocaine to numb the urethra. That ensures that the procedure isn’t all that unpleasant for a male. Well it might be distasteful and a little uncomfortable, but certainly it isn’t painful if the mans urinary track system is fairly healthy.

So lets put it this way, the lidocaine laced lubricant in the syringe like tube goes in a different place than where House put it, and he did not need to over medicate himself. Especially, when as a doctor, he should have known he’d have almost instant relief from his pain once that catheter started doing it’s job.

I think that it’s the fact that Houses problems snuck up on us and became a major focus of the show - in an unpleasant way - that turned many of Tuesday nights viewers off.

House always has some kind of personal problem each show. We’re use to that, but the main focus should have been the patient that they were trying to treat. I think that many of us came away feeling that House and a problem that shouldn’t have become so bad, that he likely caused himself, was the main focus of the episode.

What do you think?