house
whac-a-mole (8/24)

Hugh Laurie stars as the curmudgeonly medic in the third season of the acclaimed hospital drama. This week, House is confronted with the case of an 18-year-old man who has a heart attack. Meanwhile, the friendship between House and Wilson is pushed to breaking point when the police turn up the pressure on Wilson for lying about his friend’s medication.

Jack Walters is brought in after vomiting and having a heart attack in the restaurant where he works. Another of his symptoms is itchy feet, which catches House’s attention. Jack has been the guardian of his younger brother and sister since their parents died in an accident. House challenges his team to come up with the solution by lunchtime, and each of them sets off to run their own tests. House, meanwhile, suspects that Jack is still taking drugs, despite his claims to have stopped using. “I’m clean,” the young man says. “I’m raising two kids –it would be pretty irresponsible, wouldn’t it?”

The tests come back negative, and House reveals the answer: Jack has Hepatitis A. However, after being given treatment, he starts bleeding from the arm, ear and nose. House diagnoses a bleeding disorder and orders a spinal tap, but during the procedure Foreman accidentally breaks one of Jack’s ribs. The infection has now spread to his bones. The team are then astonished to discover positive results for three more infections: “We knock down one infection and three more pop up,” House says.

The doctors treat Jack for all three infections but he begins to have seizures every few hours. Jack’s immune system seems to be weakened, although he is HIV negative. House returns to his earlier theory about drugs, saying there may be traces of them in Jack’s fat cells. He sends the patient and his three assistants to a sauna in order to ‘sweat’ fat cells out of Jack and invoke another seizure, but the results show that Jack’s blood is still drug-free. In desperation, House tells Foreman to run another scan on his brain. This time, spots show up that could be tumours.

House suspects the tumours may actually be blobs of pus from a fungal infection. He tells Foreman to stick a needle in Jack’s brain to extract the blobs: “If you suck out a liquid, then I’m right,” he says. House’s diagnosis is correct, but they are still no closer to a solution. House theorises that Jack could be suffering from a genetic disease brought on by the emotional trauma of his parents’ death. But in order to determine which condition Jack has, House must resort to radical tactics. He plans to infect him with four different germs to flush the real culprit out. It is only when House sprays the germs on his patient that he admits his approach is unorthodox: “This isn’t exactly FDA-approved so just keep it our little secret,” he says. But only time will tell if his plan makes Jack better or worse.

Also this week, House tries to convince his team to prescribe him more painkillers, without success. And Detective Tritter puts Wilson under further pressure for covering up House’s self-medication by impounding his car and suspending his licence to prescribe. Wilson’s lawyer urges him to cooperate with the police: “Dr House is probably going to jail. You keep on lying for him, you’ll go right along with him,” he says. House, meanwhile, is unapologetic about landing his friend in trouble: “You are not going to make me feel guilty about what Tritter is doing,” he says. Wilson is furious when he sees that House will do nothing to help, and throws him out of his office. Has House’s recklessness cost him the only true friend he has?