Watching House

Ack! I missed the title of this one! Sorry! Got the recap though - and it’s a good one!

The show opens with a 16 year old playing obnoxious chess against another teen - before this episode I didn’t know there WAS such a thing as obnoxious chess - but there is! The 16 year old beats the other teen and then gets up, grabs the time clock, and starts beating him bloody with it.

In the hospital, Chase is checking him out and asking questions and is getting insulted left and right by this kid. We head into the diagnosis discussino with all of the gang, and Foreman is fairly quiet, for once. House tells them to go do some tests, and Chase doesn’t want to. Cameron doesn’t understand why, “It’s just a sick kid”, so he tells her to do it. She declines, and Foreman ends up dealing with the kid.

During the tests, the kid remarks that Foreman must be sick of being picked on. Foreman says, “because I’m black.”

The kid replies, “no, because you’re gay.”

Foreman comes back the next day from an interview, thoroughly pissed at House. Turns out, when he got to the interview, they told him that he had called to cancel. He blames House. House denies that he did it and heads for Cuddy’s office.

House blames Cuddy! Cuddy denies that she did it, and just before House leaves her office, he asks for permission to give the teenager ’shrooms. He believes that cluster headaches are to blame for a lot of the problems, and since none of the other medications are working, he wants to try something different. Cuddy eventually agrees.

The kid goes on ’shrooms and has the trip of his life, picking on Chase and telling Cameron how hot he is. It is when he’s flashing Cameron that she notices that his testicles are undersized. This adds a new symptom to the board (on top of the board is Personality Disorder, by the way).

Cuddy goes to Wilson assuming that HE is the one that canceled Foreman’s interview. Wilson says that he wouldn’t do that - he wants Foreman to leave because he thinks House needs someone to tell him “no”. “He’s like a six year old”, Wilson said.

More tests on the annoying 16 year old - they want to see if his recent diet change to meat (he was a vegetarian) has anything to do with it, so they ask him to eat three hamburger patties to see if his ammonia levels go up. The kid refuses, and Chase calls the nurse with the restraints - fed up with the kid. He eats on his own. Then they decide to starve him for the night to see how his glucose levels react. This puts the kid into a whirl, and he starts attacking the nurse, his mother, Chase and Cameron with his IV stand (like a lion tamer with a chair). They want a urine sample and he obliges….peeing on the floor. During his lovely little interlude, his pee turns bloody. In the last few tests he’s gone into liver failure AND kidney failure.

Foreman has had another interview, and gets called to Cuddy’s office. Cuddy offers to double his salary and let him lead his own office, parallel to House’s. Foreman declines - upset that someone in the building was dishonest enough to cancel his first interview.

Wilson goes to Cameron and makes up a sob story, saying that Cuddy’s going to fire him because she thinks that he canceled Foreman’s interview. Cameron sees through it and, after she’s told him off and repeated AGAIN that she doesn’t like House, tells him that she didn’t do it. She then goes to see Chase to tell him that she thought HE did it. As he would have nothing to gain, he realizes that she thinks he did it just to be vindictive. This ticks Chase off - he’s annoyed that Cameron believes he would act that way.

“By the way,” he grits out, “It’s Tuesday…I like you”. Cameron seems a bit too smug about how difficult it is for Chase to get the words out.

House decides to stress the kid out, in order to see if he’s got another medical condition (forgot the name on this one - sorry!). He brings in a chess board and takes on the chess whiz. After some pretty rough quips back and forth, the kid starts grinning, and tells House that he’s done - he lists all of the moves House was going to take and says that he’s got him. “Lay your king down”, he repeats. He then goes into a seizure. The nurses take care of him while House looks over the board and then grimly lays down his king.

Foreman has to go in and get blood from the kid again and immediately gives him a sedative. The mother gets upset (the entire time she’s been bouyed by thoughts that his attitude is a medical condition) and responds, “That’s not fair - he’s sick”. Foreman replies, “People who have tuburculosis are sick, but I’m not going to let them cough on me, either.” More tests reveal that it’s not what Foreman thought it was, and he reports to House. House wants him to give the kid another round of meds, and when Foreman starts to argue, House responds.

“There’s two options. You can argue and then give him the treatment, or you can just give him the treatment.” Foreman sighs and starts to walk off when House responds, “Your’e not ready. There was a third option - ignore what I said and give him the antibiotics. You still trust my judgement more than your own.”

Chase comes into House’s office and accuses him (once again) of screwing with Foreman’s interview. House denies, when Chase reponds that House would do it because it makes them all run around chasing ghosts. House grins and responds, “and sometimes I forget why I hired you,” and admits that he did cancel the interview. He refuses, though, to tell Foreman that he wants him to stay. During this discussion, Chase is clicking the chess piece against the table, and House’s eyes narrow.

He walks into the teens room and asks him to pick a color (one chess piece hidden in each hand, one black, one white). The kid pics one and then grabs for the piece. When he does, House bends his thumb back. The kid’s joints and body was not aching because of all the fights he had been in, as they had assumed, but because he’s got too much iron in his blood. The iron builds up and makes everything ache, including joints, and made some of the bones form wrong. He stabs the kid in the wrist and lets it bleed into the garbage can.

“He’ll need dialysis, and then to have his blood drained every few months…for the rest of his long, long life.”

“And the personality disorder?” The mother responds.

“Sorry,” House says, “The iron isn’t to blame - your kid’s just a jerk. Probably partly because of you.”

House then leans over the kid and responds that he wouldn’t have moved his chess pieces the way the kid thought, but would have done it a different way (in a flurry of numbers and letters that I couldn’t understand LOL). The kid says, “I know - I was bluffing you. That’s why *I* won.”

House walks out of the room and replies, “I hate that kid.”

One more episode left - ACK! How will we survive with no House during the summer!?

House, Recap