A woman is hassling a couple she believes to be her biological parents, and after they ignore her she attempts a buddhist prayer. It involves lifting a statue of Buddha twice. On the second life, she falls to the floor and coughs blood. Back to blood coughing cold opens, eh? Not the most interesting way to start an episode.
While examining this case, it’s revealed that House is avoiding his mother’s calls about his father’s funeral. He abandons the team’s pleas to return the phone calls to examine the patient, and diagnoses her early with SARS. Cuddy later enters his office and gives him a vaccine as a preventive measure against the disease. At the same time, she tells him that his mother called her and asked that he give the eulogy. She leaves, and a few minutes later, he collapses. Concomitantly, the patient begins to crash.
House awakens in a moving vehicle with Wilson driving.
“I’m not doing this because I care.”
The team calls to tell House of a blood clot that Chase was able to remove from the patient and they suggest a hereditary condition.
Wilson seems to have removed House from all of his crutches. He is holding onto his Vicodin, telling him he doesn’t need his cane at a rest stop, and subsequently gets his keys tossed into a storm drain. House tells Wilson that he never believed his now dead father to ever have been his real father due to physical differences. He tells Wilson that every second spent at the funeral is a lie.
Wilson: “She wants to think – for a moment – that she had a happy family. So give her a moment – lie.”
Kutner finds the patient outside smoking, and they briefly connect over similar circumstances in their adoptions. When he tries to take a blood sample, she immediately soaks the gauze and he rushes her inside.
To further stall the trip, House gets himself and Wilson arrested for a traffic violation. They are arrested because Wilson has a warrant for his arrest in Louisiana. Something House was apparently supposed to have taken care of. Before he’s handcuffed, House is disconnected from a call with the team, unable to finish his metaphor, they are confused and don’t know what to do with the recently discovered pancreatic cyst.
A great scene in this episode has the “old” team convening to discuss the last bit of House’s metaphor and decide that he was leading to a diagnosis of gallstones. Kutner arrives with the same diagnosis, but too late, unfortunately. A nice little scene that almost had the new team looking undeserving of their position.
Wilson explains to the police officer that he was in the instigator of a bar brawl in Louisiana during a medical convention that he and House had met at. House bailed him out of jail, and this was the beginning of their relationship. A fax comes in from Louisiana state police that they aren’t willing to spend the money to get Wilson back, and so House and Wilson are returned to their trip. In another conference call, Hadley suggests pumping bubbles into the cyst and following them to the organ it is affecting. The patient is suffering from alcohol withdrawal symptoms, and cannot remain still. She is paralyzed for the procedure.
The expression on House’s face when he sees his mother at the funeral home is heartbreaking. He finally gives the eulogy. It starts off rocky, with him blaming his father for what he’s become, and being egotistical and stubborn (sound familiar?), but he suddenly walks to the casket and leans in to give his father a peck on the forehead. It’s almost touching until he takes a skin sample from his father’s ear at the same time for DNA testing.
House and Wilson get into a childish argument about how Wilson desperately needs House and is hiding it beneath his resentment. This irks Wilson enough to warrant a bottle through a stained-glass window. House later calls the team and diagnoses her with an iron overdose, using ultrasound images he can’t even see from 500 miles away.
After speaking with the lawyer that was with the patient in the cold open, House and Wilson deduce from her birthdate that her family was subjected to China’s “one child” policy. This makes it extremely likely that her parents attempted to murder her. During the “differential diagnosis” discussion between him and Wilson, House says: “This is fun, isn’t it?” Wilson smiles.
The patient’s second attempt to life the Buddha statue triggered a magnet in the base (used by the temple to dupe the religious) which shifted pins that were inserted in her brain by her parents. The murder attempt was unsuccessful, so she was put up for adoption. The pins struck a nerve that triggered symptoms in her lower intestine.
“We’re all screwed up by our parents. She has documentation.”
House reveals the DNA results to Wilson. It seems that even at twelve years old, House was able to recognize that his father was not biologically related.
Nice moments with the old team this episode. Wilson was sorely missed last week, but I also found myself missing Lucas this week. The diagnosis was extraordinarily farfetched, even for House, but satisfying. How did he come to the conclusion about the magnets, though? A road-trip episode with House and Wilson more than makes up for the shaky medicine. This season is getting stronger, but last week’s ep was better balanced.
Mike Trevino is a rabid fan of House and The Office and blogs out of San Antonio, TX.
