Watching House

Finally! A new episode of House has aired. The second half of Season three begins.

The episode begins with House walking into Cuddy’s office as if he’s been summoned there. She asks him if he has any cases to which he replies that he has three and goes on to describe them. Cuddy isn’t pleased and assigns him two days of Clinic work. House says “but I have a case!”, She replies back that she knows he’s lying and if he hadn’t lied she would have only assigned him one day of clinic work. And so it begins …

Cuddy knows him only too well, doesn’t she? They go back and forth about how he owes her, she kept him out of jail, and she can put him back. She’s going to hold that over his head for a while it seems. The thing is House knows that she can’t put him back in jail without perjuring herself (again), yet it seems he’ll put up with her demands requests for the time being, although he’s bound to try anything he can to get out of it.

In the next scene we watch House talk to three patients in a row who complain of problems “down below” - as in sexually transmitted diseases. On with the gloves Dr. House!

When he goes out to the nurses desk with a swab, he asks the patients who is here because they have a cold? He tells them to go home, but Cuddy catches him. Just as they are about to get into it again one of the patients sitting in the chairs begins running around the clinic, holding his head and screaming as if he’s in great pain.

House is standing by the pharmacy counter watching the mans action. The pharmacist offers a sedative. BZZZ wrong - a nurse would be offering it from the med room, not the pharmacist! House trips the man as he goes by with his cane and grabs a syringe off the pharmacy counter. He injects the man low in the buttock area.

I must say that this isn’t the correct place to give an injection in the hinny as he could have hit the sciatic nerve that runs through the buttocks and damaged it.

The second problem with this scene is that House claims to have injected the man with a paralytic. I would guess that that would be succinylcholine (normally kept refrigerated, not handy in a pharmacy and certainly not something a pharmacist would hand to a doctor. The only docs that usually use this drug are anesthetists). This drug paralyses the muscles and stops the patients from breathing. It’s used when doctors are intubating a patient, and since the muscles are paralyzed anyone who’s been given an injection of this drug must be bagged or intubated and assisted with breathing until the drug wears off. It’s not the drug of choice to inject someone running around a room and screaming. Haldol for someone having a psychotic episode, or Versed for someone that needs to calm down and be sedated would be a much better choice. I wish the writers for House would get these little things right. I know it might not seem like such a big mistake to someone who doesn’t work in the medical field but it’s HUGE.

Naturally House decides to take on this mans case saying to Cuddy that “Either I can continue swabbing crotches, or I can find if this guys delirium, pain and insanely high heart rate are life threatening or just a personality trait.” Cuddy sighs and nods.

In the next scene we see the man lying in a hospital bed with breathing tubes en mass hung over him. The man is still sedated, having been given 5 cc’s of hadol to calm him, and I guess the paralytic must still be working otherwise he wouldn’t be intubated. Yet, Foreman is heard to say that “it took 5 cc’s of haldol to get him down after the paralytic wore off” - so why’s he intubated?

The scene switches to House talking with Cameron, Chase and Foreman discussing the mans case. Foreman decides to do an MRI because he thinks the man might have had an acoustic neroma that started a hemorrhage. Chase wonders if the man was psychotic and had a complete break down and damaged his ear. They are thinking somethings wrong with his ear because House claims that the man rubbed his ear before running in an oblong pattern around the clinic. He also stated that running in an oblong pattern rather than circles indicates he was dizzy. Chase’s suggestion gets him approval for a complete psychiatric workup. Cameron wonders if he had a chronic infection that caused pressure to build up in his inner ear and bursts through the mastoid bone while he was waiting in the clinic. House keeps going Oh Yeah like he thinks her idea is delicious. He suggests a head CT, blood cultures and chem panel, and complete blood count.

As House’s team is leaving the room to get to work House calls out “Oh while you’re at it “pour some alcohol in his ear and take out the cockroach”.

The jig is up, the gang knows House is just doing this to get out of clinic duty, yet for some reason they still go off and do all the tests on the poor man - at least I’ll assume they did because Cuddy naturally questions the testing in another scene when she finds out that House has been lying about the mans illness after seeing Cameron working in the clinic because she felt guilty for what House did.

My question is, if they did go ahead and do an MRI, CT, have a psychiatrist consult with the patient and run a lot of blood work - who’s paying for all of that? The mans HMO? Right. Tsk tsk.

In the next scene House is sitting in a park at a picnic table with a lady bug on his arm. Wilson walks up to him and they have a talk about why he’s there. House claims he’s just watching the joggers. Really he’s just hiding from Cuddy and believes that Cuddy won’t be able to find him in the park.

The next scene involves Cameron seeing patients in the clinic. As I’ve explained above she’s there because she feels guilty that House is ditching his duties and making up false cases. She sees an older man that looks rather down and out. He hands her a paper that he received from another hospital that he’d been seen in and it says that he has a 6 millimeter tumor in his right lung that is inoperable. She asks him if he knows what that means, and he understands that his cancer is un-treatable. He asks if he can stay the night in the hospital since it’s cold outside. She agrees and admits him.

As a result of Cuddy talking to Cameron in the clinic, Cuddy goes and finds House in the park and questions why he’d order and MRI on a man with a bug in his ear. She also notes that he’s taking Vicodin again and is surprised since she really believed that he was honest about rehab.

She threatens him saying “you are going back to the clinic, or jail”. House stands up to her and says that she perjured herself already to keep him out of Jail. House also points out to her that every threat she makes to him from now on is going to be weighed with the “or go to jail” line. He says he’d rather go to jail and begins to walk away. She turns and softly says “You owe me”. He turns back and looks at her, thinks for a minute and then sighs.

In the next scene House is back in the clinic looking through a magnifying tool at a mans eye and discussing his impeccable cleanliness. The patient says he noticed that House’s shirt is rumbled and his hair uncombed, and face unshaved, and wondered if he applied the same lack of detail to his work. House interrupts him as he looks up the mans nose and asks him if he uses toenail clippers to cut his nose hairs. The man begins to explain that he uses clippers because they are longer and House cuts him off saying that he’s “wearing a rumpled shirt and forgot to brush his hair this week and you have Athletes foot in his nose, I’m ready to be judged.”

When House if finished caring for his picky patient he walks to the nurses station and calls out “$50 to any patient who’s willing to leave here right now”. Three people take him up on his offer. One is a man and his young boy. House later sees the man and his son being wheeled through the hospital by another doctor who I’m assuming was a surgeon. The doctor says to House when he protests that the patient had left the clinic that the boy had swallowed a magnet and had to have abdominal surgery to get it out.

House says he doesn’t need surgery, that the magnet should be far enough through his system to not cause any problems. The other doctor claims that they couldn’t test because the magnet messed up the tests (uh it wouldn’t mess up an x-ray!!!). House grabs a scalpel from the counter (yes hospitals just leave scalpels sitting around) and unsheathes it. The father is stunned thinking that House is about to cut his son open right there. House simply holds the flat blade of the scalpel close to the boys stomach until it sticks somewhere near his belly button. Which would indicated that the magnet had made it’s way through most of the small bowel by this point and likely wouldn’t cause any problems as it made it’s way through the rest of his system. Surgery averted. It was a cool diagnostic trick. I’ve got to see if that works the next time I care for a kid that’s swallowed a magnet.

Back to the clinic scene. Cuddy of course catches House offering $50 to patients willing to leave the clinic and she makes a deal with him to make his clinic duties more interesting. For any patient that he can diagnose without touching she’ll pay him $10, and for any that he has to touch he’ll pay her $10. It doesn’t seem like good medicine to me, but House falls for it and soon he’s teaching patients to take their own pulse and hold tongue depressors in their mouth properly as he takes a look. He’s up $30 very quickly, but ends up owing Cuddy $10 after examining a very beautiful patient.

House reexamines his possible STD patients once the test results come back. The only one that ends up being positive is a young girls. He diagnosis her with Chlamydia and she begins to cry. He tries to reason with her telling her that not only is it treatable, but it’s curable and he comes towards her with a medicine cup that contains a couple of pills. She had her head down teary eyed up to this point, but as he gets close she knocks the cup out of his hand and yells “Don’t touch me!” and she looks rather fierce as she eyes him.

House goes to Cuddy’s office and asks to have someone cover a patient. Cuddy thinks he’s just trying to get out of clinic duty again but he tells her that his patient was raped. Cuddy goes and speaks with the patient telling her that another doctors been assigned to her care. However the patient wants to keep seeing House. Cuddy tries to explain that it’s better if she’s seen by a doctor that specializes in cases like hers ie a psychiatrist, but she wants to keep seeing House.

In the next scene House and the patient are in a treatment room talking. She’s literally up against the wall as far away from him as she can be, and he’s on the opposite side of the room on a stool. He asks her why she wants to talk to him and she can’t really give him an answer except to say that she trusts him. It turns out that House is the only person she’s told about being raped the week before. House tells her he doesn’t want to treat her, and she thinks it just so that she’ll see the psychiatrist. He agrees but he also explains that her rape case really holds no interest for him. God he can be blunt at times can’t he?

She pretty much agrees that she’ll see the psychiatrist but as he’s about to leave the room she says she still wants House to be her doctor. The only reason she can give him is that she trusts him and she wants to talk to him.

Later we see her sitting in the room talking with the psychiatrist - Dr. Stone.

In the next scene we see Cameron and her patient with lung cancer talking in one of the patient rooms. The man is lying in bed begging for the treatment to be stopped. He doesn’t want any measures taken that will make him feel better and make his death easier. Cameron doesn’t understand.

House sees another patient, and as he’s discussing the case at the nurses station with Cuddy- who’s apparently living in the clinic this episode, he glances at his rape patient who’s talking with Dr. Stone the psychiatrist. They’ve been in the room for about an hour. Cuddy questions if he’s concerned and House mouths off that he can’t really be more concerned about his patient than the other people throughout the world who’ve been raped … but it’s obvious this case is getting under his skin, which I believe is just what Cuddy was hoping for by assigning him to clinic duty. She wants him to develop a little more feeling for his patients.

It’s around this time that House sees the boy and his father return to the hospital and he performs his magic magnet finding test. The best line in that little scene was when he asked the kid how old he is and the kid replies that he’s eight. “eight, and he swallowed something stuck to a fridge. Darwin says we should let him die.” the father just looks perplexed at this statement.

Just as House finishes finding the magnet in the boys stomach he hears a call for a crash cart STAT! and he runs back into the clinic - or hobbles quickly with his cane in his case.

The rape victim that had been talking with Dr. Stone is lying on the floor in a treatment room frothing at the mouth. She apparently swallowed a whole bottle of benzo’s (Benzodiazepine tranquillizer?) and I guess they reacted very quickly. The doctor has been giving her a couple of sedatives when the girl grabbed the whole bottle and swallowed it down. Apparently during their session the patient hadn’t said a word. The doctor did all the talking.

In the next scene we see House patiently sitting at his patients bedside as she wakes up. She has soft restraints on her wrists and he asks her if she’s going to do anything again before he removes them. She wonders why he’s there, and he says he was told he had to be there. She has an IV and is also getting oxygen via nasal prongs.

I can see her getting O2 while she was out of it, but the nasal prongs stay on for several scenes. In other episodes of House we’ve seen patients who’ve had heart attacks or breathing problems without nasal prongs or an O2 mask shortly after their crisis so I don’t understand why they left the O2 on her for so long. They should keep them on for the heart and lung patients- but not in this case.

House again questions why she wants him as her doctor, saying that she tried to kill herself because she couldn’t talk to him. Again she replies that she doesn’t know why she wants him to treat her. “Does there have to be a reason, can’t we just talk” she asks. He tries to get her to talk about what happened to her and she keeps saying no. She says she’ll talk about anything but not her rape. House doesn’t understand.

Next we see House back in his office talking to Chase, Cameron and Foreman. They’re all trying to figure out if he should keep trying to get her to talk or not. Foreman thinks that she just wants normalcy even if it’s just talking about the weather. She wants to feel that the world hasn’t changed just because that happened to her. Cameron thinks that House needs to get her to talk about what happened to her, while Foreman disagrees. Foreman thinks that she can pretend that this didn’t happen and that it would be good for her to do so. Cameron disagrees and tells him she can’t deny she was raped. It happened and she can’t pretend it didn’t.

House goes back into the patients room saying “You gotta tell me what happened”. She doesn’t believe that he really wants to hear and claims that he’s lying when he says “sure I do”. He tries to reason with her and says that just because this happened to her it doesn’t have to change her life, it doesn’t mean that she has to not trust mean, or that just because the world sucks today that it’s not going to suck tomorrow. She says she knows all that, and he replies then tell me what I can do to help you? what do you want me to tell you? She says nothing. I just want to talk.

He replies back to her “About nothing?” she nods, and he says “If we talk about nothing then nothing is going to change”. She thinks things will change because time changes everything. House thinks it’s just a saying and it’s not true. “doing things changes things, not doing things just leaves things exactly as they were”.

Flip over to Cameron as she sits at the bedside of her dying cancer patient. She asks him why do you have to suffer, and he says that he made a promise. Cameron asks who he promised and he replies that he promised his father, saying his father said that he would die alone and miserable. Cameron says it’s not a promise.

The patient seems to know about Cameron’s ex husband and asks why her husband has to suffer. This freaks Cameron out a bit. Apparently the nurse told him about her husband but he denied it at first. Later he apologizes and explains that he was trying to freak her out because he needs someone to remember him. He doesn’t have any relatives and he wants to leave a lasting impression on someone before he dies. He seems to think he can do this by refusing treatment as he passes on. Cameron tries to explain that suffering isn’t going to make her remember him anymore than his going peacefully.

The scene switches back to House and his patient talking about their schooling. We find out that House went to Hopkins in this discussion. He wants to know why she trusts him and says that it’s not rational that she trusts him. She fires back that she was raped- how is that rational. Then she asks him if anything terrible has ever happened to him. He doesn’t know how to answer.

In the next scene he’s talking with Wilson about his predicament and we find out that he sedated her rather than answer he question. Wilson thinks that the girl is looking to connect with him so that she can really trust him, and House just can’t see the point. Wilson insists “tell her the truth”.

Next he talks to Cameron and she tells House to tell her that his life has been good. He says it hasn’t. Cameron insists that he should lie and tell her his life has been good anyway, and give her hope that what happened to her wasn’t the norm. Then he talks to Foreman who suggests that House tell her that his life sucked. House says It didn’t. Foreman says tell her anyway, she wants to know that she’s not alone, she wants to know that she’s going to survive this and heal. Chase tells House to keep her sedated.

House wakes the patient up in the following scene, and decides to open up about what happened to him. He says that his grandmother- his Oma (he has a Dutch background it seems) used to punish him, often for no good reason. He’d sometimes end up sleeping in the yard, or having a bath in ice water. He said his parents traveled a lot and his grandmother abused him because she was very particular.

The rape victim didn’t believe him because he claims he didn’t tell his parents, and because he kept calling his grandmother Oma. She insists that he wouldn’t keep calling her oma. (although it sounds like she’s saying alma - its OMA). He finally admits that his story is true for somebody but not him, and becomes frustrated with her. He asks her if she’s going to base her whole life on someone she got stuck in a room with. She replies back that she’s going to base this moment on who she’s in a room with. She goes on to say “that’s what life is. It’s a series of rooms and who we get stuck in those rooms with adds up to what our lives are”. Cuddy calls House out of the room at the moment.

Cuddy questions what other tests he did on his STD patients. He tells her that his patient is pregnant.

House goes back into the patients room and tells her that she’s pregnant. He then tries to tell her about the “Termination procedure”. She doesn’t want to terminate because abortion is murder and every life is sacred. He argues that not all life is worth keeping or sacred. Was Hitlers life sacred. He tries to explain that he really isn’t for murder but when it comes to unborn children there’s a fine line.

He tells her that she’s healthy and that she shouldn’t be in the hospital. She doesn’t want to go so he says he won’t discharge her. In RL patients don’t get to decide! He then asks her if she wants to go for a walk.

The next scene is one of Cameron’s final scenes with her dying patient. She’s fed up with him refusing treatment and she tries to give him some pain medication through is IV. He refuses saying he needs her to remember him. He thinks that if he dies in peace that he’ll be just another patient to her, but if he dies suffering she’ll remember. She tries to tell him that he’ll have a horrible death. He says he just needs to die knowing that something is different because he was here. She gives up and sits down on a chair to watch over him.

House and his rape victim end up back in the park talking at the picnic table by the pond. They talk about God and why this happened to her. She doesn’t think there’s a reason why she was raped. House replies back- Oh so there’s no good reason why you were raped but you have to keep your “rape baby” for no reason”. She says maybe he was challenging me. House replies he “Hurts you to help you?” She thinks he’s trying to convince her that there’s no god.

In the end he’s just trying to convince her that keeping a baby conceived in rape is going to cause her to throw her life away. He finally says that he can’t help her. “if you believe in eternity than life is irrelevant”. She says that “if you don’t believe in eternity than what you do here is irrelevant”, he replies back “Your actions here are all that matters” she says “Then nothing matters! There’s no ultimate consequences.” House just sits back and looks at her as she whispers “I couldn’t live with that”.

House then asks “So you need to think that the guy who did this to you is going to be punished” to which she replied that she “needs to know that it all means something, I need that comfort”. House than asks her if she’s feeling comfortable now. Feeling warm inside? She comes back and sits beside him and says “I was raped. What’s your excuse?”. The scene ends with House just looking at her.

Back in the dying mans room Cameron watches the mans labored breathing. When he finally stops breathing she goes to his side. Oddly, there’s a nurse standing in the doorway of the room with a crash cart? If the man didn’t want treatment he’s be marked as a DNR (Do not resuscitate) in his chart and there is no way she’d be standing there with the crash cart ready to go. Cameron gets up and does after death care on the mans body by washing his hands and body and removing any tubes or other equipment. Nurses usually do this procedure.

Back to the park where House and the girl are sitting at the picnic table. She sighs and looks at House and asks “Do you think the guy who did this to me feels bad?” House asks her if it would help her and make her feel better. She looks at him and asks why he always answers her questions with more questions. He says to her that the “answer doesn’t interest me, I don’t care what he’s feeling. I’m interested in what you’re feeling. ” She’s surprised and says “you are?”. House replies back “I’m trapped in the room with you right? Why did you choose me?” She sighs and says “There’s something about you. It’s like you’re hurt too. ”

House slowly turns around. Painfully pulling his leg out from under the table. “It was true” he tells her. She says “What was” and he says “It wasn’t my grandmother, but it was true.” He’s looking down as he says this, as if it hurts him to admit his deep dark secret. She leans in and asks “Who was it” and House suddenly looks up and turns to her and says “It was my dad”. They both contemplate the revelation for a moment and they she sighs heavily and says “I’d like to tell you what happened to me” and House tells her that he’d like to hear it. The scene fades away as she begins to tell him that it was her friends birthday party.

In the final scene Wilson and House are playing Fooseball in the lounge. Cuddy walks in and House says “She terminated” as he keeps playing the game. Cuddy asks if she’s going to be ok and House says “Yah, it was that simple”. Cuddy says she’s talking about what happened, that’s huge, you did good. House says that everyone tells you that that’s what we’ve gotta do to help someone when all we’ve done is make a girl cry. House doesn’t know why he helped her when Wilson asks why he did it.

As House leaves the room, Wilson asks him if he’s going to follow up with her and as he’s departing House says “One day, One room”.

So what did you think of that episode? Give me your thoughts please.

House, One day On room, Rape, cancer, clinic duty, STD, sexually transmitted disease, chlamydia, psychotic, psychiatrist, Lung cancer, cancer treatment, pregnancy, murder, abortion, termination