Season 2 recaps

These are the Season 2 recaps:

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House is awesome. Dont hate

Episode 1:

ACCEPTANCE
Aired 9/13/05
Clarence, an inmate on death row starts seeing hallucinations of the people he killed -- his girlfriend, a rival gang member and a cop. Clarence screams to be let out of the room and then collapses on the floor.

House barges into Cuddy’s office when he notices that Stacy is there. He demands to be given Clarence’s case because he is intrigued that the patient’s heart was beating so quickly to cause the body to pump air instead of blood. Cuddy reluctantly gives him the case and House sets off for the prison.

Dr. Cameron sees a patient named Cindy who needs a health clearance for her new job. Cindy appears to be a little anemic, and the employer sent her to the hospital for more tests. Cameron is surprised by what is on the x-ray and turns to Dr. Wilson for confirmation. Although it seems obvious what the patient is afflicted with, she only suffers from a slight cough. This doesn’t make sense.

House diagnoses Clarence as hypoxic with fluid in his lungs. He will die in an hour without a respirator. The prison warden isn’t very sympathetic, but House calls for an ambulance. The warden insists that no death row inmate leave through the front doors. House has Stacy acquire a legal injunction and Cuddy is enraged by him pulling strings for this.

Cameron presents Cindy’s file to House, who immediately dismisses it as metastatic squamous cell lung cancer. The patient may have only six months to live. Cameron begs him to think of other ideas, but he urges her to inform Cindy that she is dying. Cameron can’t believe that House will treat a death row inmate over Cindy. Foreman thinks heroin might be the cause of Clarence’s tachycardia and pulmonary edema, so House orders a drug test.

House’s team examines Clarence, but he awakes and freaks out. The guards struggle to restrain him. The results come back with no sign of opiates in Clarence’s system. As the doctors try to figure out causes and symptoms for the heart troubles, Stacy glares at House from the hallway. House shuts the blinds to his office and requests an arterial blood gas test. After the meeting, Stacy corners House and demands to know if she can trust him. Obviously, she can’t.

Foreman draws blood from Clarence’s femoral artery. The tests results indicate a new symptom -- anion gap acidosis. Is it possible that Clarence thought he was taking heroin in prison but was really injecting something else? The team mulls over the causes of anion gap acidosis, and Cameron throws out INH, the drug for tuberculosis. House sends Chase to the prison to find Clarence’s secret stash.

Wilson finds House watching television in a coma patient’s room. Wilson wonders whether House only needs people to like him because he needs people to help him get things done. If Stacy can’t trust him, he can’t use her. Suddenly, House gets a page that Clarence is dying. He injects him with atropine to buy a few hours. House calls Chase to see if he found anything, but Chase has only found boxes with office supplies in Clarence’s cell.

House visits Clarence and pours him a shot of 150-proof rum, explaining that a dying man deserves one last drink. He asks Clarence why he tried to kill himself by ingesting copier fluid. Clarence admits that he wanted to take control of his life. House tells Clarence that the copier fluid contains methanol, which is poisonous. But the rum they just drank contains so much ethanol that it’s going to bind with the formic acid. Clarence will merely pee out the toxins.

Stacy asks if Clarence is clear to return to death row, but House still thinks the man is sick. Cameron stakes out a small area on the white board in House’s office for Cindy’s symptoms. House comes in and immediately erases it to change the topic back to Clarence. Why would he try to kill himself after filing for an appeal? The other lingering question is why his heart went nuts before drinking the copier fluid. House orders a full battery of tests. Yet Chase and Foreman see that Clarence’s CT scan is completely normal.

House later returns to his office to find Cameron sitting in his chair. She wants a procedure that could possibly indicate Cindy doesn’t have cancer. House says a biopsy would be more definitive but denies the request. Cameron lights into him. He finally agrees that if she covers two of his clinic hours, Cameron can run her test on Cindy. Cameron inserts a bronchoscope into Cindy’s nose and she reports to Wilson that it showed no sign of infection. He tells her that she’ll have to biopsy.

Cuddy barges into House’s office. Stacy told her about Clarence and he will be sent back to prison. Clarence, meanwhile, complains of tremendous stomach pain, but Cuddy doesn’t believe him. House pulls back Clarence’s sheets, revealing a large pool of blood on the bed.

The surgeons remove almost a foot of necrotic bowel from Clarence. House starts to wonder why Clarence killed the people he did. They figure that Clarence killed his cheating girlfriend over jealousy, his first cell mate for revenge, and an abusive guard for retribution. But why did he kill the second inmate? House asks Clarence about the anomaly and he doesn’t want to talk. House badgers him and Clarence finally opens up. He admits that he felt like the guy could stare straight through him. Clarence just freaked out and killed him.

House, Foreman and Chase ponder the sudden cause of this rage. Chase suggests adrenaline, but House tells them about pheochromocytoma which sits on top of the adrenal gland and spits out adrenaline randomly. Although extremely rare, it explains everything.

Wilson discusses Cindy’s diagnosis with Cameron. The biopsy was positive and she is terminal. Cameron says that she just spending time with Cindy because she has nobody else. The woman’s parents are dead and she has no siblings. Wilson tells her it’s not worth it and could mess her up for years. Cameron thinks that when a good person dies, somebody should notice and get upset.

House tells Clarence that he will need an MRI to confirm the diagnosis. However, Clarence has prison tattoos which are usually made with heavy metal causing the MRI to suck them. Clarence refuses to have the tattoos removed, and the MRI still shows the pheochromocytoma. After the treatment, Clarence is cured.

Foreman talks with House about Clarence’s tumor. Since it explained the rage attacks, it possibly explains Clarence’s murders. Foreman plans to testify at Clarence’s appeal hearing. House says that a small tumor doesn’t absolve Clarence of what he did. Plenty of other people managed pheo rage attacks on their own.

Cameron hugs Cindy as she gives her the final diagnosis.

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House is awesome. Dont hate

Episode 2:

AUTOPSY
Aired 9/20/05
Andie, a 9-year old girl with cancer, grabs her pills for the day. Before she can inject her stomach with another medication, she sees the bathroom shake. The mirror shatters, cutting her palm.

Although he is suffering from allergies, House reports to work. Wilson immediately buttonholes him and asks for help on a case. Andie is terminal with alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma and she is hallucinating. However, the tests show that her cancer is in remission. So the hallucinations are unrelated.

House presents the case to his team, and they offer up differential diagnoses. Ignoring his staff’s suggestions, House asks for a tox screen and an MRI. Foreman finds that both are clean. Noticing that Andie’s oxygen saturation is off by one percent, House suggests that his doctors check into it. The doctors resist because the sat rate is within the margin for error and this won’t explain her brain problems. House orders a battery of respiratory and chest tests.

Chase begins to administer another test to Andie. She’s a real trouper, having been through numerous tests with her illness. She mentions to Chase that she’s never kissed a boy and probably never will. Andie asks him to kiss her, but he can’t. She begs him, and after much thought, Chase agrees. They share a sweet, non-sexual kiss.

The next morning, House returns to the office. Chase reports that all of the new tests were also clean. Foreman throws out an off-the-wall suggestion -- neurosyphillis. Even though they don’t think a 9-year old has had sex, it is possible that she was molested. House orders treatment for neurosyphillis, IV PCN. Chase insists this isn’t possible because Andie told him she’s never been kissed. Cameron asks the girl and Andie says nobody has ever touched her.

House confers with Wilson that Andie’s sat rate has dropped another point, which Wilsons says suggests a tumor in her lung. But that doesn’t explain the hallucination. House thinks there is a tumor in the heart, but Wilson insists tests showed otherwise. House demands another explanation. Wilson points out that only one condition simultaneously affects the heart and brain -- tuberous sclerosis. But the chances of one girl having two unrelated cancers at once are statistically impossible. House is thinking about exploratory surgery. Wilson notes that it could kill an immunocompromised little girl.

House calls his team into the doctors’ lounge shower and plays an audio file of Andie’s echocardiogram on an iPod. He has them listen for an abnormality in the valves of her heart that might indicate something else. Cameron picks up on an extra flap in the mitral valve. House has a surgeon look at Andie’s mitral valve and he wants Chase there.

Chase pages House during Andie’s surgery to report that there is a tumor that starts in the lung and extends to the girl’s heart. It did not get picked up in the MRI because it runs along the heart wall. Wilson tells the mother that, because of the placement, the surgeons have to temporarily remove Andie’s heart. Wilson breaks the news that there might not be enough heart left after the tumor is removed. If the tumor has metastasized, there’s nothing they can do.

During the surgery, Chase notices a bleed in Andie’s right eye which is not normal. The next day, House and Wilson review that the cardiac tumor was benign and was not the cause of the hallucinations. The team struggles for explanations. House realizes that the heart tumor broke off a clot before they removed it. He asks for a brain angio to find the clot.

The angio comes back clean. House knows there’s a clot somewhere in Andie’s head, but exploratory brain surgery is not an option. Wilson breaks the bad news to Andie and her mother. House watches from a distance and notices that Andie has no emotional reaction to the news. Back with his team, House wonders if the clot is causing hallucinations as well as messing with her emotions. Where’s the fear center of the brain? Foreman says it’s in the amygdale, near the hippocampus. However, a cut in there will kill Andie. They won’t get to see this clot until the autopsy. This gives House an idea.

House pitches Cuddy on the notion of inducing hypothermic cardiac arrest so that they can siphon off two liters of blood and perfuse the brain while Andie’s in an MRI. He is proposing to kill her for a period of time then bring her back to life. Cuddy thinks he will need FDA approval, but because the procedure isn’t invasive, House disagrees. Cuddy knows this is the only shot since Andie will die within a day. She firmly tells House to inform the mother that this is the longest of long shots.

Wilson explains the procedure. Although the mother is shocked by this, she agrees. Wilson tells House that the description of the procedure was too much for the woman to comprehend. So House visits Andie and lays out the situation. He says that a lot of people wouldn’t want a monumental procedure just to buy another year of pain and hospital visits. Yet Andie wants to go through with it for her mother.

That night, House gathers a surgical team to practice for the surgery. Once Andie has been cooled and is on bypass, they have sixty seconds to remove two to three liters of blood out of her body and get it back in for the MRI to occur. If her body is bumped just slightly, they’ll get nothing which means Andie is dead. They run a test procedure on a cadaver. Yet every time they try to intubate, the cadaver’s head moves slightly. After many failed attempts, Foreman suggests bolting her head to the table. House is up for it.

The next day it’s time for the real show. Andie’s body is cooled down to 21 degrees. They now have sixty seconds, and begin the blood draining. The clock ticks down and they pump the blood back in. Time runs out, but nobody has seen anything. House keeps the time running. Foreman sees something four millimeters lateral to the hippocampus. Nobody else saw it. Foreman is positive he saw it. They immediately begin rewarming Andie.

Andie gets through the procedure and the surgeons work to remove the clot. Foreman directs the neurosurgeon to find the clot. Later, Andie awakes and sees her mom at her bedside.

Wilson lets House know that Andie is going home. According to the surgeon’s report, the clot was nowhere near the amygdale, which means that her fear center was working perfectly. Andie actually was brave in the face of death, despite House’s overwhelming cynicism.

As Andie is wheeled out of the hospital, a large contingent of doctors and nurses is there to send her off with applause. She approaches House, hugs him and smiles.

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House is awesome. Dont hate

Episode 20:

EUPHORIA, PART 1

Aired 5/2/06
A cop named Joe Luria corners a young gang member in an alley. Joe giddily mocks the perp as he reads him his rights. The gang member pulls his gun and shoots. The bullet shatters against Joe’s flak jacket, with a piece deflecting up through Joe’s neck and into brain matter at the base of his skull. Joe lies on the ground, laughing as blood gushes from the wound.

House and the team deduce the cause of Joe’s hysterical reaction. Chase thinks that the bullet fragments in the brain are to blame, but House points out that it is the wrong area to cause euphoria. They will need to expand their search, factoring in Joe’s cough and cloudy lungs.
Chase mentions carbon monoxide poisoning, which would explain the elevated heart rate, coughing and imp
Aired neurological functions. House considers that the patient might have been exposed to CO indoors and went outdoors before collapsing. He orders an arterial blood gas test. In the meantime, they must check Joe’s squad car, personal car, precinct and home for gas leaks.

Chase finds low-level CO poisoning. He is about to slide Joe into the hyperbaric chamber when Joe’s fist suddenly clenches. As his brain struggles for oxygen, Joe loses motor function. That grim news can’t take away Joe’s giddiness. Yet when Cameron mentions that someone is checking Joe’s home for a gas leak, he immediately turns serious.

Foreman searches Joe’s incredibly filthy apartment for some clues. He swabs samples from the rank kitchen. Foreman then steps through the window onto the building’s roof and notices a shed with a power supply. He finds a hydroponic marijuana farm.

House goes to the precinct and hears a cop with a raspy cough. The man’s desk is right next to Joe’s, below the same air conditioning unit.

Back at the hospital, Foreman is convinced that marijuana is the explanation. House believes that Legionnaire’s disease is the cause, citing the rancid water in the AC unit as evidence. The next morning, Joe is feeling better, and Foreman observes that his COHb levels are down. Chase points out on the x-rays that the clouded area in the upper lung lobes are clearing up. Joe seems more concerned with making sure Foreman won’t reveal what was at his apartment. Suspecting something is wrong, Foreman spins around the portable light board and shows it to Joe, who agrees that the x-rays look fine. The doctors realize that Joe is blind.

Foreman reports that Joe’s papillary responses are intact, the fundus looks normal and there’s no macular degeneration. He thinks Joe has Anton’s Blindness, a condition in which patients can physically see but the brain cannot process the information. This indicates damage to both occipital lobes. A stroke is a possible explanation. House suspects a brain clot, but they can’t do an MRI because the bullet fragments will move and shred Joe’s brain. Cameron suggests an angio x-ray. Although House considers this a waste of time, the team badgers him into it.

Cameron explains to Joe that they will send a catheter through his femoral artery to his brain. Foreman remarks to him that he’ll be back on the streets scaring people. When the team reconvenes in the morgue with the results, Cameron presses House to remove Foreman from the case because he hates cops. Foreman says he was just having fun with a hypocrite, so House lets him stay. There is also the fact that Foreman is the team neurologist.

The angio shows some clotting, but not enough to be decisive. House again suggests an MRI, which Foreman again shoots down. House pulls out a gun and shoots a cadaver with an identical bullet. They can now run a test MRI to see how the bullet is affected. Cameron and Chase are shocked and scared, while Foreman is merely bemused.

Cameron continues to harp on Foreman’s behavior. House asks whether it was aggressive or giddy, noting that Foreman’s amusement at the gunshot isn’t a normal reaction. Foreman adamantly insists that being bored by House’s insanity isn’t proof of illness. With the cadaver in place, House flicks the switch on the MRI. The bullets are immediately ripped out of the skull and forever buried in the magnetic coils.

They learn that the MRI is out of commission for at least two weeks. Foreman wonders if doing nothing is their only option, seeing as how the giddiness seems to have disappeared. The blindness hasn’t, so House orders an echo of Joe’s heart to search for the source of the clots. They could get lucky.

As Cameron and Chase perform the ultrasound, Joe goes into tachycardia. They rush to save him, while Foreman merely stands back and giggles. Chase recognizes intracranial bleeding, forcing them to cut Joe’s temple to relieve the pressure. Foreman can’t stop laughing.

Foreman is sealed in an airtight bio-safety room with Joe and two nurses wearing full biohazard suits. He still insists that he’s fine, but House is more focused on finally getting a chance to use an MRI to locate the problem. They will use it on Foreman.

House draws his own blood sample and informs Chase and Cameron that anybody with an elevated SED rate is joining Foreman. He has noticed in the MRI an area of increased T2 attenuation in the cingulated cortex. This mushiness would explain the euphoria, but what explains the mushiness? House asks who wants to investigate Joe’s apartment next. Cameron turns to leave, but House stops her. Foreman brought back samples from the apartment. House was merely testing them.

Cameron sorts through the samples using protective gloves built into a protective steel case. At the same time, Chase tries to draw blood from Foreman. Foreman asks Chase what they’re thinking because he believes it might be a staph infection. If Chase delivers linezolid directly into their brains, Foreman and Joe can be cured.

The samples test negative for toluene, arsenic and lead, and the blood is negative for West Nile or Eastern equine diseases. Cameron wants to go to the apartment for more samples, but House refuses to allow it. He wants to take a sample from Joe’s brain, but surgery is impossible because he is on blood thinners. Using Foreman is the only option. Chase tries to resist with everything Foreman told him earlier. Yet House knows where Chase is getting this line of thought.

House heads down to the isolation chamber to talk to Foreman directly. House doubts that he has a staph infection because it would present in numerous different ways before a brain abscess. House offers Foreman a release to sign so he can biopsy his brain, but Foreman wants to see the MRI first. He insists that the mushy spot on the x-ray could have developed into an abscess by now. House mentions fever and Foreman’s reads 101.6. Foreman insists that House put an omaya reservoir into his skull and treat him for staph.

A neurosurgeon drills into Foreman’s skull, exposing his brain. Foreman, wide awake during the procedure, looks at flash cards for Chase and identifies the simple shapes on each one. Foreman then hears House’s voice coming from behind his head and realizes what’s going on. House is going to biopsy his brain. Foreman orders him to get out of his temporal lobe.

Foreman wakes in the middle of the night, back in the isolation room. Joe says he can’t see anything, and Foreman is encouraged by this because Joe is now aware of his blindness.

The biopsy shows non-specific signs of inflammation. Cameron quickly points out that House’s “can’t miss” idea stole a billion of Foreman’s brain cells, turning up nothing. Yet the biopsy was also negative for a staph infection. Cameron again asks to go into the apartment. House turns her down once more. They will instead retest the samples for any toxin, bacteria or fungus that attacks the brain. House orders Cameron to suit up to monitor Foreman for Anton’s Blindness. They need to track Foreman to see how far behind he is from Joe.

Wilson questions why House is being so cautious and avoiding Joe’s apartment. House doesn’t want to lose another doctor. Wilson realizes that Foreman is not simply another patient to House, no matter what he claims.

As Joe writhes in agony, Cameron tells Foreman they found nothing in his brain. Foreman suggests returning to the apartment because he might have missed something. The cause may be listeriosis. Cameron says that they cannot go back because of the danger. Foreman becomes angry. He picks up a syringe he used to draw his own blood and jabs Cameron in the leg. He says she can either tell House what happened or head to Joe’s apartment to save all three of them.

House and Chase stand outside the chamber as Foreman throws out possible diseases to them. Joe continues screaming in pain, so Foreman picks up a syringe and injects morphine into his IV. Chase yells that Joe is already at his daily limit and more could kill him. Realizing that the pain could cause a stress cardiomyopathy, House makes no attempt to stop Foreman. The screaming continues, and the doctors realize that Joe has a new symptom -- hyperalgesia. The infection has spread to the pain center of the brain, which is telling Joe that his entire body is in tremendous pain. No amount of medicine can soothe it. House tells Chase to suit up and induce Joe into a coma.

Foreman continues to throw out explanations to House, who wonders why Foreman isn’t concerned that Cameron is missing. When Foreman doesn’t react, House starts to figure out where she is.

Cameron samples Joe’s entire apartment, including his rooftop farm. As she is re-sealing the biohazard tape on the door, she turns and finds House. Cameron tells him about the needle, and House can’t believe she came to the apartment instead of killing him on the spot. Even by breaking the skin, the chances of infection were remote. Cameron wanted to be here.

House roots through Cameron’s samples. He’s disinterested by the normal garbage, but his curiosity is piqued by the inclusion of three loaves of rye bread. He sends Cameron back inside. Using his cell phone, he directs her out onto the roof with the bread in order to draw out pigeons. He instructs Cameron to look for pigeon droppings. She doesn’t find any, and House has her look for a dustpan because he figures Joe uses the droppings for fertilizer. She finds a used scraper on a bucket. The bucket full of pigeon droppings is the perfect home for Cryptococcus neoformans. Once that enters the brain, it causes happiness, blindness and intractable pain.

Cameron puts a sample of droppings onto a slide and adds GMS stain. She doesn’t get the result she was expecting and sprints upstairs. In the isolation room, Joe crashes. Cameron runs up and tells the team that the sample was negative for Cryptococcus. As the doctors suit up, Foreman shocks Joe with no results. A subsequent epi injection does nothing. Joe dies.

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House is awesome. Dont hate

Esode 21:

EUPHORIA, PART 2
Aired 5/3/06
House implores Cuddy to let him take a sample from Joe’s brain. She refuses because Joe’s death made this a bio-safety hazard. The CDC will perform the autopsy and return results to them in three days. House points out that Foreman might be dead in 36 hours, but Cuddy doesn’t budge. They don’t have the tools to do this safely, so it’s out of her hands.

House comes up with an idea, and he heads down to the isolation room. He slides an ice pick and hammer through the airlock, telling Foreman to cut into Joe’s eye in order to extract some brain tissue. Cuddy rushes down and orders Foreman to stop. She then has another doctor suit up and enter the room to restrain Foreman. House presses Foreman to continue. Instead of slamming the pick into Joe’s eye, Foreman drives it into the mattress. Foreman senses that it didn’t feel right, but he removes a sample from the mattress anyway thinking that it is Joe’s brain. Realizing that Foreman has Anton’s Blindness, House asks Cuddy if she still wants to wait for the CDC.
House, Cameron and Chase convene for a differential diagnosis on Foreman. They throw out various diseases, none seeming likely to be the culprit. House orders them to start treatment for everything they can think of. He leaves to find another brain to biopsy. Even though they are worried that a heavy regimen will trash Foreman’s organs, Chase and Cameron slide the pills to him. Foreman feels each pill and discerns what it is for. He realizes that they have no idea what’s afflicting him and grudgingly takes the medication.

House goes to Joe’s apartment in a biosuit. He has the rat that he trapped in Stacy’s attic months ago with him. He calls Foreman in the iso room and asks him to detail his steps. House carefully inspects each area, making sure to expose the rat to everything that Foreman was around. When House hangs up, Foreman calls his father.

The next morning, Wilson finds House staring intently at his computer. House has set up a webcam to monitor the rat in his own kitchen. As soon as the rat becomes sick, House will perform an autopsy.

Cameron draws blood from Foreman and he notices that she left the tourniquet on his bed. His vision is returning in response to the treatment. Yet which treatment worked? House wants to stop individual medicines one by one to find the one that caused a regression in his vision. Before Cameron can do anything, Chase reports that Foreman’s amylase and lipase levels are three times the normal level. His pancreas is failing due to the meds, which must be stopped immediately.

House goes to Foreman and tells him what’s happening with the meds. Foreman asks him to lower the dosages, but even lower doses would be toxic. If they continue the meds, Foreman will appear to see for the next four hours until he dies. If they stop, he’ll lose his vision but buy time for a diagnosis. Foreman agrees to cut the meds.

Foreman’s father Rodney arrives, and House explains to him that a brain is available but Cuddy won’t allow them to autopsy it. House then escorts Rodney to Cuddy’s office, and the man questions her about her decision. Cuddy struggles to give him an answer, and explains that the deadly infection Foreman has could put many more lives in danger. This Rodney understands.

Foreman assures his father that it won’t be a painful demise. Wilson catches up with House outside of the morgue to report that the rat is still healthy. He also has noted that House is preoccupied with the guard stationed in front of the cooler holding Joe’s body.

Foreman’s vision regresses and he has reached an eight on the pain scale. The disease is progressing faster than it did in Joe. House is slightly encouraged by the anomaly and asks the team what that could mean. Cameron comes up with the fact that many diseases affect blacks differently than whites. House has them look up all bacterials, fungals, toxins and parasites to find any documented racial disparities. House remembers that the rat is still perfectly healthy and he thinks perhaps that’s the difference between Foreman and Joe.

Cuddy visits Foreman in isolation. He’s enraged that she won’t ignore CDC policy to help save his life. House comes in and announces to Foreman that he’s dying too fast. He holds up a vial holding legionella pneumophila. Joe had Legionnaire’s disease when he got infected, and it somehow slowed down the progression. Joe didn’t die until they cured the Legionnaire’s. Foreman refuses to inject himself. House simply opens the door to the isolation chamber and tosses the vial in. It shatters.

Cameron watches as Foreman takes his own temperature. It’s down to 101.0, and Foreman reluctantly admits that his pain is no worse. He did contract Legionnaire’s, and it has indeed slowed the progression of the mystery disease.

With the rat still not sick, Wilson wonders aloud what House will do if the rat never falls ill. House has a realization, and declares Wilson’s suggestion as brilliant. He walks out and asks Cameron what illnesses affect humans and not rats. House then tells her that she didn’t become sick because whatever it is isn’t blood-borne.

Chase suggests that some bacterial infections don’t affect rats, but Cameron counters that Foreman has tested negative for every bacterial infection that affects the brains. House observes that when they test for bacterial infections, they’re really looking for antibodies. The body might not be fighting the infection. If the body doesn’t recognize the first infection, that infection will run rampant through the body. Yet when Legionnaire’s is contracted, the body does recognize that and increases white cell count to stave it off. The body unintentionally fights the first infection as well. They need to figure out what bacterial infection affects humans and not rats which the body is unlikely to recognize.

House informs Foreman that the answer is Listeria, so he will start him on Amp and Gent. He puts the antibiotics in the airlock, but Foreman requests certainty. He asks House to perform a white matter biopsy. House refuses, because any slip will render Foreman an invalid. Foreman fears the antibiotics will bring back the pain if House is wrong. House begs him to try the medicine first. If it doesn’t work, he will biopsy the brain again. Foreman takes the pills.

As Cameron changes the antibiotics IV bag, Foreman writhes in pain. He implores her to put him in a coma, asking her to be his medical proxy. He quotes from her medical journal article about the importance of a well-informed decision. Foreman then apologizes for stealing her material for his own article. She agrees to be his proxy, but doesn’t forgive him for what he’s done.

Chase finds Rodney Foreman in the hospital chapel and lets him know that they need to put his son in a medical coma. However, if they cannot solve the problem, he won’t wake up. Chase suggests that he visit his boy before that happens. Rodney dons a bio suit and spends a few moments with Foreman before Cameron induces the coma. As she administers the IV, Cameron tells Foreman that she accepts his earlier apology.

Wilson implores House to perform the biopsy, dismissing House’s claim that it is too dangerous. Wilson asserts that House doesn’t spend time with patients because he’ll get close to them. If it were anyone else, he would have drilled into their heads long ago. Cameron reports that the EEG shows that Foreman is still in pain. She demands they do the biopsy now. House still refuses. Cameron hands him the paper showing her legal proxy status.

Cuddy confirms that the proxy letter checks out. She instructs Cameron to proceed with the biopsy and ignore House’s interference. Cameron remarks that Cuddy is no hero because they could have cut into a dead man’s head long ago. Cameron then apologizes. House follows her out and begs for an hour. He wants to go back to Joe’s apartment and to see if another animal died. The place was such a dump, there must be more vermin there. If House finds something, he can cut its head open instead of Foreman’s. Cameron tells House that when Foreman’s O2 stats hit 90, she must proceed.

House, not wearing a biosuit, again inspects the apartment. He notices a pigeon hit the window and the rooftop shed. The bird is blind. House stalks the bird, but it flies off.

Cameron readies the neurosurgery tools. Cameron calls House to announce that she is about to proceed, but House tells her that the water Joe uses for his marijuana might be the answer. Cameron already tested that water and it is clean. House is stumped. Foreman’s O2 stats drop to 89, so Cameron starts the biopsy.

House follows the piping to a water tank. He quickly calls Cameron to say that they tested the wrong water. The tank he found is riddled with Naegleria. She already knows this because her biopsy showed the same results. House is dismayed.

Cameron finds Rodney Foreman to let him know that his son has primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, which is a parasite that goes through the nose and migrates into the brain. There it feeds on brain cells. It is treatable and will cause no lasting damage. However, they don’t yet know if the surgery or coma produced any side effects.

Foreman gets transferred from isolation to the ICU. He comes out of the coma and doesn’t feel any pain. House tests his vision and Foreman successfully follows his finger. House then asks Foreman to identify the people in the room. Foreman realizes that they performed the biopsy. He successfully names Cameron, his father and House. House then asks Foreman to wiggle his left toes. Although Foreman says he moved them, his toes remain still. House becomes concerned, and has Foreman raise his right arm. Foreman raises his left.

_________________
House is awesome. Dont hate

Episode 22:

FOREVER
Aired 5/9/06
Brent Mason is woken early by his crying baby. He starts to gag over the sink and his wife, Kara, begs him to stay home for the day. Brent leaves the house, but collapses and vomits. He returns home to find Kara in the bathtub with the baby. She’s having a seizure and the baby is underwater.

The EMTs wheel Kara and her 4-week old into the ER. Chase goes to work on both of them. Meanwhile, Wilson gloats to House that Cuddy asked him to dinner and he thinks she wants to suck up to him for some favor. House is sure that she’s up to something.
Cameron has Chase’s case from the ER, but she must wait to present to House because Foreman has returned. Foreman is happy to be back at work, but House is skeptical. He asks Foreman to make coffee, and watches as Foreman struggles to open the bag of grinds. Although he still has some spatial analysis troubles, Foreman says his left side/right side reversal is gone and everything else is basically fine.

Cameron brings up the ER case again, but House dismisses the simple seizure diagnosis boring. Foreman calmly and easily diagnoses the epilepsy with elevated calcium levels as either hypertherothyroidism, cancer, or calcium-mediated neurotoxicity. Yet Foreman can’t diagnose how the coffee maker works. The ER has already ruled out all of the obvious and simple explanations, so House becomes interested. Cameron suspects Whipple’s and House considers vasoconstriction. Chase just thinks it’s strep, since Brent is also sick, but he cannot help the team because he is stuck on neonatal intensive care duty.

Cuddy arrives at her office to find House waiting. He wants to know why Chase is in the NICU. Cuddy claims that they are short-staffed there, but House knows that is a lie. He realizes that Chase asked for a new assignment.

Kara and Brent test negative for strep. Cameron jokes about Foreman’s health, and he says it doesn’t matter because he is alive. His worst case scenario is to teach. Cameron is confused, and she asks about his dreams of landing grants and running his own department. Foreman answers that if he cannot figure out the coffee machine by then, he doesn’t deserve the chance.

Chase makes the rounds in NICU when baby Michael Mason begins crashing from a lack of oxygen. At the same time, Cameron struggles with Kara in the MRI. The woman tensed up as Cameron inserted a catheter, and blood went flying. Yet this is not a seizure because Kara’s muscles aren’t contracting. She is so tensed that her back is completely arched.

The team meets in the NICU to figure out what causes seizures, hypercalcimia and the rigidity. Chase is there, examining x-rays of Michael’s lung. He suggests lithium as a cause of all three symptoms. Foreman throws out myluminous meningitis. House likes that and orders an S-PAP and an MRI. Then he advises Chase that Michael’s lung problem is bacterial, not chemical. House asks Chase point blank why he doesn’t want to work with him. Chase says he just needed a break from the intense pressure. House isn’t buying it.

House brings Wilson items from Cuddy’s trash -- a receipt from a pharmacy and an empty box of Red Clover. Both doctors know that Red Clover is used for cancer. House observes that Cuddy asked an oncologist to dinner instead of any other doctor in the department. House thinks that this isn’t a date but a consult.

Cameron reports that Kara tested negative for meningitis, but she is bleeding into her brain. Foreman, who searched the Mason home, only found a hidden bottle of vodka. Cameron is ready to believe that alcoholism is the cause, but Foreman goes deeper into the history. He thinks that, with the family’s growing debt and the new baby, Kara developed conversion disorder where psychological stress presents itself physically. House is leaning more towards alcoholism. Since Kara’s tox screen was negative for alcohol, he orders a phenocoma as treatment for DT. Foreman walks out without objection, which irks House. He questions why Foreman isn’t defending his point, but Foreman says that House would have overruled him because he had probably considered the father anyway. Besides, Foreman is a changed man.

Brent and baby Michael come in to see Kara before her coma is induced. She apologizes for what she did, but Brent doesn’t blame her. Foreman informs House that the happy Mason couple met in AA. Obviously, Kara had a relapse. House looks into Kara’s room and sees her with her back to the hall. The baby is missing from the bassinet. He and Foreman race into the room to find her smothering Michael. Foreman pulls her away as House grabs the child. With Michael unconscious, House calls for the crash cart and begins infant CPR.

Foreman explains to Brent that Michael is stable, but the lack of oxygen caused kidney damage. Brent concludes that Kara accidentally rolled over in her sleep, but Foreman says that he witnessed it. Brent refuses to believe it. In her room, Kara tells Cameron that the voices told her that Michael would be better off dead.

When the team reconvenes, Cameron now theorizes that Kara faked the seizure when Brent caught her trying to drown the baby. Foreman thinks the seizure was real. The postpartum made her try to drown Michael but the stress caused the seizure. House wonders why nobody is talking about actual physical illnesses anymore. Foreman thinks he has a point, and offers to draw some blood. This drives House insane. He begs Foreman to start sticking up for himself. He wants Foreman to stress Kara into another seizure. House instructs them to take her off haloperidol, hook her up to an EEG and start flashing lights. If Kara starts twitching, the machine will tell them if the seizures are real.

House wants to know how Wilson’s dinner with Cuddy went. Wilson says that it was a real date and that cancer never came up. House asks why he is in the lab doing a PCR test from a spoon. He deduces that it must be Cuddy’s spoon from dinner. Wilson admits that he’s checking her saliva for cancer markers. House tells Wilson to find him when the results come in.

Chase tells Brent that he needs to start Michael on dialysis. Because of the kidney damage, the boy’s potassium level is rising and if it doesn’t come down then he will have a heart attack. The stress test on Kara is completely uneventful until Cameron notices that the brain activity is slowing down. Foreman and Cameron look into the room, only to see Kara grasping and sucking. This, combined with muscle rigidity, means encephalopathic delirium. While this is an actual physical illness to work with, the progressive nature of the case means it can’t be long before Kara’s brain shuts down entirely.

Baby Michael suffers a heart attack and Chase tries to shock him back. The team is stumped for causes. House throws out pellagra and Foreman agrees with it, pointing out that alcoholics have horrible diets and often lack niacin. This starves the brain, which causes everything Kara is suffering from. Chase brings the team the news that Michael is dead.

Foreman pulls Kara out of her coma and asks her a simple question to test her acuity. She is more interested in finding out where Michael is. Foreman informs her that the pellagra was making her believe things that weren’t real, and Kara confesses that she remembers doing things to her son. Foreman breaks the news that Michael is dead. Kara wails in agony and then vomits.

Foreman finds blood in her vomit, which is not caused by pellagra. Whatever Kara has is getting worse. Thinking about the dead baby gives House an idea. He finds Brent, who is cradling Michael’s lifeless body. House tells him that the baby had the same condition as Kara. Yet House cannot biopsy her because she will bleed to death. House needs the baby, but a resentful Brent won’t hand over the child to help his wife. House angrily turns things around on him, pointing out that he was drinking as well. If he made any effort at all to pay attention to what Kara was going through, then he would have picked up on her symptoms before it got this far. Brent agrees to the tests.

House lets Chase know that Michael’s body is available for tests, but Chase isn’t interested. House then holds up Chase’s paycheck and asks why he’d be working in NICU while using his vacation days from House’s staff. He wants to know why a rich boy like him need the extra money, especially when his late father left him money. Chase coldly responds that he’s not rich.

Before performing the test on Michael, Chase says a prayer for strength. He reports to the group that Michael’s intestines show slight villous atrophy. House asks the team how polystyrene treatments could cause flattened villi. Foreman points out that the polystyrene itself couldn’t cause that, but House wants them to look at the binding agents. Cameron brings up wheat gluten. Both Kara and Michael had celiac disease, an affliction where the body cannot process gluten. Each time the gluten was introduced to the body, the small intestines were further damaged, until they reached the point where they couldn’t receive vitamins and minerals. This led to the niacin deficiency, which created the other problems. Celiac is also why Michael’s medicines didn’t work. His body couldn’t absorb them. Additionally, celiac patients are susceptible to cancer of the stomach lining, which would explain the bloody vomiting.

Wilson announces to House that Cuddy is negative for all cancer markers. House goes to Cuddy’s office and tells her that she doesn’t have cancer. She’s more than a little surprised by the test results, mainly because she didn’t know that tests weren’t being run. Cuddy’s estrogen is too high because she is on fertility meds. Her dinner with Wilson was an audition. Cuddy confesses that she’s looking for a sperm donor, not a partner.

Kara refuses treatment. House visits with her and learns that she feels guilty about killing her own son. House assures her that she’s blameless because she is now healthy except for the cancer. Kara still declines treatment.

_________________
House is awesome. Dont hate

Episode 23:

WHO'S YOUR DADDY?
Aired 5/16/06
Sixteen year-old Leona is on an airplane with her father, Crandall. Leona is black and Crandall is white. Crandall has taken Leona in from her troubled mother. Leona hallucinates that water is gushing out of the cockpit to flood the cabin. This is similar to what she experienced in the hurricane that devastated New Orleans. Leona’s heart races, then stops. She collapses on the cabin floor.

House’s leg is causing him tremendous pain, but when he searches for Vicodin in his home he only finds empty bottles. With tremendous effort, he climbs onto a stepstool to reach a lockbox on the top of his bookshelf. He takes out a syringe and a vial of morphine. As he is about to inject, House hears Cuddy leave a message on his answering machine. She has admitted a teenage girl with cardiogenic shock but no heart attack. House becomes intrigued and puts down the syringe.
House goes to the hospital, and Cuddy informs him that Leona’s EEG and EKG are normal, she has no signs of infection and the tox screen came out clean. Her heart looks fine. House realizes he knows Crandall from his younger musician days. Crandall explains that Leona’s grandfather was Jesse Baker, a famous jazz musician that they both idolized. Leona lost her mother in Hurricane Katrina and Crandall is her natural father. House is convinced that the mother lied to him because Crandall always was a trusting sucker.

The team tosses out possible causes and Houses asks them to retest everything that was checked in the ER. He considers the possibility of arrhythmia but it would not cause a hallucination. They would have to keep Leona under observation for months to spot another arrhythmia, so House intends to induce one. Cameron thinks it’s too risky, but House presents the option to Crandall. House advises Crandall to sign the consent form even though the test is dangerous. He then asks Crandall for a DNA sample so he can run a paternity test. He thinks Leona is just using him.

In the electrophysiology lab, Chase threads a catheter through an artery and into Leona’s heart. The sinoatrial node is normal. Yet when Chase pushes into the atrioventricular node, the heart goes into a supraventricular tachycardia. The EEG shows normal brain waves, so there is no hallucination. House asks Chase to reset and continue the test but Chase balks, concerned that Leona’s heart is fragile after the last attack. House presses him to do it. As Chase enters the next mode, near the cornary sinus, the EEG goes wild. Leona is now hallucinating. Chase freezes a tiny area of heart tissues near the probe and everything returns to normal.

From her room, Leona hears a woman asking for water. She pulls back the curtain and finds a bloated corpse with water pouring over it. Leona, who is really still in her bed, sits up and screams.

Cameron reports that they haven’t fixed Leona’s heart. Chase insists that the heart is fine and the hallucination must have another cause. House proposes an atypical seizure rather than a hallucination. As he discusses the case, House repeatedly exits the room to pace in the hallway. The team realizes he’s trying to walk off leg pain. House comes back in and tells the doctors the fact that they predicted, found and cured Leona’s heart problem means the hallucination should just be a coincidence. What if it was caused by the pain of the arrhythmia? Leona might have a disease that translates pain into bizarre physiological responses like hallucinations,

Picking up on this, Cameron considers the fact that Leona may have an autoimmune disease so she recommends a CRP, ANA rheumatoid factors and cryoglobulins. House believes a PET scan will test her response to pain. House straps Leona into a PET scan, assures her that this won’t hurt, then jams a syringe into the meat of her palm. Leona screams, but Foreman reports that the cerebral cortex response is normal. House then jams the syringe into her thigh. Leona begins crying as House grills her about Crandall and her real father. He then bends her middle finger backward as Foreman reports the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex also looks fine. Crandall rushes into the room to stop House, and that’s when the PET scan lights up. Leona starts to hallucinate.

They confirm that Leona has an autoimmune disease, but they need to discover which one. House suggests killing them all at once. Cameron points out that this would require replacing her entire immune system. House is fine with that, but a bone marrow transplant requires an exact match and Leona has no siblings. House walks off. Crandall barges into House’s office and reasserts that he’s Leona’s father. Crandall demands that House test his marrow. House tells Crandall that he has been scammed. This is not the first time he’s been taken.

House and Wilson watch Leon go through radiation. House says that Crandall is not a marrow match, although he didn’t do a paternity test per Crandall’s request. A match was found in the marrow registry. House notices black goo oozing out of Leona’s mouth. House and Wilson have no idea what it is.

The lab results on the goo come back, but House already knows what it is. True to his suspicions, the goo contained stool and digested blood. He recognizes a reverse peristalsis. In order for digested blood to be in the intestines, Leona must have internal bleeding. There must also be a blockage forcing the material up and out of the mouth. Foreman tosses out liver failure. With no proteins to clot blood, it could leak into her stomach. House realizes that this means they were wrong on autoimmune disease. Nothing would shut down an organ in two hours. He orders a liver biopsy.

House finds Crandall and tells him that they need a liver biopsy, but are not sure what will happen. Leona could die the second they stick a needle into her liver. Foreman and Chase begin the biopsy. The needle is millimeters away from Leona’s liver when House pages Foreman with instructions to stop.

In House’s office, he plays some of Jesse Baker’s music for the team, He wants them to hear an uncut portion when a drunken Jesse rails at an engineer for not tuning his piano correctly. The team is unimpressed, but House points out that the piano was not out of tune. If Jesse was drunk, his playing would be off. He is playing perfectly. Something else is ruining his personality, and House believes his aural perception was off. Combined with Jesse’s fatal liver failure, this means he had too much iron. Jesse could have had hemochromatosis, which is genetic.

House takes the doctors to Leona’s room and shows them a picture from Crandall’s book about Jesse. Leona was thirteen then, but her skin is darker now. House attributes this to grayness from direct iron deposits in the skin and tan from too much melatonin. Both symptoms are products of hemochromatosis. House asks for a SQUID exam to calculate the amount of iron in the blood. He prescribes desferoxamine as a treatment, assuming she will be fine after that. A subsequent MRI does indeed reveal lots of iron on Leona’s liver.

Chase starts Leona on an desferoxamine IV, explaining to Crandall that the chelating agent will bind to the iron so that the liver will be able to process it. As the medicine drips into Leona’s bloodstream, she starts gasping for breath. Chase urgently intubates. A CT reveals that Leona’s lungs are basically swiss cheese. Chase thinks her time is up.

House starts over, asking what is supposed to happen when desferoxamine is introduced. Chase explains that iron is heavy and gets stuck. The desferoxamine bonds to it and acts as a lubricant so the iron can be processed and discharged through waste. Yet now, Leona’s waste is heading north, not south. Has the iron moved into her lungs? Oxygen will attach itself to iron, which increases the chances of infection. They had put Leona on antibiotics earlier to prevent infection and try to figure out what else would attach to iron. Cameron brings up neurodegenerative disease with brain iron accumulation, but there are no iron deposits in the brain. Foreman inquires about fungus, and Chase points out that there are 25 antifungals. House asks them to go broad. Cameron says the most common fungus is aspergillis. House orders them to continue ventilation, start a voriconazole drip and hope Leona has aspergillis.

Wilson has a sudden revelation. House did the paternity test, but it came back positive, so House simply dropped it. They get word that Leona’s lungs have collapsed because they have diagnosed the wrong fungus. House gathers the team and asks them to consider location.

House goes to Leona’s room and informs her that she has a fungus. If she’s lying about living in a children’s shelter before Crandall rescued her, she could die. Leona blinks, indicating that she was lying. House gives her a pad and pencil, asking where she actually was.

House reports to the team that Leona was holed up in Jesse’s recording studio. Cameron deduces that soundproof recording studios also absorb moisture. Hurricane Katrina, with its incredibly levels of mold, created zygomycosis in the studio. House asks for an IV drip of amphotericin B and colony-stimulating factors. He declares for a third time that they’ve solved the problem and that Leona will be fine. As Foreman hooks up the IV, he tells Crandall the truth about where Leona was.

House visits with Crandall and Leona. He asks Crandall why he thinks he will be a good father. Crandall replies that it feels good. House then chases Crandall out of the room and admits to Leona that he did run a paternity test. Crandall is her father. That night, House relaxes at home with the music of Jesse Baker. He examines the paternity test for Crandall. It’s negative.

_________________
House is awesome. Dont hate

Episode 24:

NO REASON
Aired 5/23/06
House examines a man named Vince who was admitted with a severely swollen tongue. He asks Vince questions to get him to speak funny. In House’s office, Foreman assumes it’s simply a routine case and walks out. Another man named Jack comes into the office and asks for House. Jack identifies himself as a former patient, then pulls out a gun and shoots House. He asks House if he’s shocked.

House wakes up in a hospital bed. Cameron is at his side. He feels his beard and can tell that he’s been out for two days. His first words are to chide Cameron for waiting. She tells him that the bullet pierced his stomach, nicked the bowel and lodged into the posterior rib. Cameron tries to explain to him what Jack had to say. Yet House is more interested in Vince’s tongue. Jack’s bed is wheeled into House’s patient room. He was shot by security when he tried to leave the hospital. House gets out of bed and starts walking to Cuddy’s office.
House complains that somebody screwed up his surgery because he can no longer feel pain in his leg. Cuddy thinks this is serendipitous, but House is worried that the surgeon messed up his nervous system.

In the ICU, House lowers Jack morphine and asks why he tried to kill him. Jack says if he really wanted to kill him then he’d be dead. Jack wants House alive because he wants to see him suffer. House disconnects the man’s morphine completely to torture him.

The doctors follow House’s instructions and biopsy a lymph node in Vince’s lower jaw. They report back that the test was negative. They cannot give Vince a lumbar puncture because of the high intracranial pressure in his head. House orders them to do the LP anyway. While performing the LP, Foreman notes that Vince’s pressure becomes normal.

Jack explains to his roommate House that he had treated his wife and cured her. In the process of the treatment, House emphasized the importance of knowing everything. This caused Jack to confess to an affair. Although the affair had nothing to do with the wife’s brain aneurysms, House told the wife about the infidelity. She later killed herself. House completely rejects this as an excuse.

House spots an attractive woman looking into Vince’s room. He is quite surprised to find out this woman is married to the very plain and overweight Vince. House doesn’t hesitate to tell her so. Having been warned about House by another friend that he had treated, the woman swats his questions easily.

Foreman and Chase discover that Vince is bleeding into his ocular orb. Chase recognizes tremendous pressure behind the eye. Before Foreman can relieve the pressure, Vince’s eye pops out.

House tears his stitches while walking the hallway. He collapses with blood coming from the wound. Back in his room, House and Jack argue over who to blame for the suicide. House denies any culpability, and Jack angrily says he knows it’s his fault. House admits that he’s partially at fault, but once Jack pulled the trigger he lost the right to an apology.

House escapes from the hospital to a local taqueria with his team where he throws out possible causes for Vince’s ailment. House wonders why Vince’s eyes and tongue were affected while his nose was spared. The problem may have a common source like the brain. Although a previous CT scan proved clean, House wants them to recheck the brain for what might be hiding. They must also biopsy the blood/brain barrier which is an incredibly dangerous procedure. Chase suggests testing for STDs, but House doesn’t think the wife sleeps around. And Vince certainly wouldn’t stray on a wife so far out of his league. Cameron is confused because Vince is a widower who is not married.

House complains to Wilson that he might have hallucinated the attractive women. Records show that Vince has had only six visitors. House frets that he’s losing his logical mind. Wilson encourages him to take two weeks to rest. House is still worried that the surgery screwed him up, and he wonders aloud why he was giving ketamine during the surgery.

House finds Cuddy and accosts her about the ketamine given to him. He wasn’t given simple anesthesia but was induced into a coma. Cuddy sees that House is now walking without a limp and exclaims that it worked. This stops House cold. Cuddy says that a clinic in Germany has been treating chronic pain by inducing a coma, which basically allows the brain to reboot itself. There’s a 50% chance that House’s pain will never return. House accuses her of having no right to do that. Cuddy scoffs that all she did was cure him.

Vince’s blood/brain test comes back negative. Yet the team found blood on the wrong side of the barrier. House wonders that, if Vince’s lymph nodes are not functioning properly, where would the trash they handle go? He starts to recite a metaphor about trash and garbage cans. Chase quickly figures out that House is referring to the chest lymph which is the next closest lymph system. He heads off to take a sample. House questions how Chase answered his riddle so quickly. Jack mocks him by saying that he’s getting dumber.

Cameron and Foreman come to House with the news that this latest test was also negative. Chase walks a post-op Vince to the toilet so that he can urinate. Vince cries out in pain. Chase leans around to look at what’s causing the problem and blood splatters on his face. Vince’s scrotum has burst. The team tries to find more possibilities. Foreman throws out testicular cancer.

Wilson tells House that testicular cancer could indeed rupture a vessel. House knows this, but is concerned that he did not think of it earlier. House becomes angry that he had to trade a good brain for a bad leg. Wilson thinks House needs his bad leg to define himself, as an excuse to always act miserable. Without it, House doesn’t have himself anymore. House asks why Wilson is defending Cuddy. House notices that Wilson seems like he’s known about Cuddy’s decision for longer than he lets on.

House blasts into Cuddy’s office and begins screaming that all he has is his brain. She had no right to put him into a coma. Cuddy and Wilson are equally angry, saying that they were only trying to help him. Cuddy complains that House’s morphine use had been spiraling out of control. House punches Wilson in the face. Wilson laughs and asks House if he’s hallucinating.

House comes to in his ICU bed, staring at Jack. He had been hallucinating. Jack says that he was calling him Wilson, but House denies it. Jack isn’t surprised when House mentions that his hallucination involved a bathroom. He coolly informs House that he wet his bed. The team enters with a negative result on Vince’s testicular cancer. House calls for a cystoscopy. It too comes back negative.

House is more interested in the fact that he can easily run up and down the stairs. He darts past the team as they throw out more possible causes. Suddenly, House stops in his tracks and asks them how he got there. He remembers being in the ICU and he remembers being on the stairs with them. He doesn’t know why he’s still on the stairs with them at the bottom. The team doesn’t know what to say.

House tells Cuddy that he’s dropping out of Vince’s case. He is suffering from blackouts and fears he is losing his mind. Cuddy asks if he intends to scare her. House wants to know why she jumped up when he came in. She claims it is because of their last angry encounter, which House knows was a hallucination. Is this also a hallucination? House wakes up in the ICU.

Over more tacos, House asks Jack how he can tell what’s real and what isn’t. Everything seems the same. House is aware that this conversation is actually a give-and-take with his own mind. Jack explains that House is concerned that he will base his actions in the real world on fantasized information, then he can cause genuine harm. Jack advises him to take no actions until his mind has settled. He should only throw out ideas and trust his team to know which thoughts are useful and which are possibly fatal.

House learns from the team that the prostate exams also came back negative. House asks them what it means if something doesn’t make sense. He makes it clear that this is not rhetorical. He needs actual help from them. House asks them very basic questions, and the team is lead down the path of surgery because the biopsies aren’t telling them enough. However, Vince’s bleeding problem makes surgery fatal. House asks about performing a surgery that’s less bloody than a paper cut.

Cameron informs Vince that they would like to use a robot to operate on him, but Vince is resistant. Cameron explains that the robot can magnify everything ten times to let them see things they ordinarily could not see. House is forced to take him to the robotic operating room to show him. House lays Cameron on the table for a demonstration, showing Vince that the machine won’t let the surgeon do anything that doesn’t compute medically. He uses the scalpel to slice a button off of Cameron’s blouse and the clamps to pull it open. Vince agrees to the procedure.

House works on Vince’s case from his hospital room. Jack interjects that House does not care about emotions. He only cares about measurable truth. Even though he cannot measure emotions, doesn’t mean they’re not real. House begins to see a car with the attractive woman from Vince’s room. The woman is actually Jack’s wife. She has a car engine on in a closed garage to kill herself. House hears Jack’s voice in his head telling him that he is miserable for nothing.

Snapped back from his vision, House apologizes to Jack. More importantly, he knows what’s wrong with Vince. House walks into the robotic surgery and tells Cameron that Vince will be fine. House asks the team why they haven’t yet tried to yank him off the case. They say that they trust his judgment and have worked with him long enough to know what he wants. House asks why they have identical knowledge. He announces that they are all visions in his head. House seizes the robotic control and attempts to drive the scalpel into Vince’s stomach. The team tries to stop him, but House needs to know if this is a hallucination. The scalpel rips open Vince’s stomach and blood flies everywhere as Vince’s vitals drop. House staggers over to the body. Vince drops a bullet from his hand and House picks it up.

The doors to the ER burst open. Cameron, Chase, Foreman and the EMTs wheel a bloody House through the hallway. Chase barks orders to the team that House was shot once in the abdomen and once in the neck. Before he passes out, House asks Cameron to tell Cuddy that he wants ketamine.

_________________
House is awesome. Dont hate