House: Saviors

Posted by: Sarah Miller  •  April 20, 2009 @ 12:52am

Filed under: Recaps & Reviews

This week, the team treats an environmental activist with a chip on his shoulder, Chase and Cameron deal with the unexpected impact Kutner's death has on their relationship and House worries that he's lost his mojo.

The Patient

This week's patient is Doug, an environmental protester who finds that he can't stand up after one of his sit-ins at a coal mine. Doug's original doctor calls in a favor with Cameron to get House to take the case, so of course House makes Cameron run all the tests by herself. First up: a water in the ear test to see if Doug's balance problems are caused by his head or somewhere else in his body. During the test Doug asks for the flowers to be removed from his hospital room and then vomits all over Cameron's shoes.

Foreman thinks that Doug's environmentalism may be stressing out his heart and arteries and causing carotid atherosclerosis. House sends Cameron off to do a carotid doppler test to examine his heart. During the test, Cameron doesn't find anything wrong with Doug's heart but she does find out that he's been having chronic hiccups for the past two weeks. Hey, ever notice how they never find what they're looking for in these tests but they always find out about another symptom through just talking with the patient?

The question now is what causes pathological hiccups and inability to balance? Taub thinks that MS could be a possibility, so House sends Cameron off to do a lumbar puncture. But Doug's hiccups make it a little bit difficult for her to get the needle in, so Foreman helps by holding him down. But as their doing the test Doug's neck swells up and makes a really gross crunching sound when House pushes on it.

Then Doug's wife shows up at the hospital. His chart had said he was single and he never mentioned having a family so the team is a little surprised to see her. The crunchiness in Doug's neck makes the team think that he may have progressive systemic sclerosis. House gets the team to start a full workup to confirm the diagnosis, this time without Cameron's help. They also start Doug on treatment for the sclerosis.

Unfortunately, mid treatment Doug starts having excruciating pain in his left leg. The team does some X-rays and finds that he has a broken femur- one that was perfectly fine a day ago when Cameron did a set of lower body X-rays. House thinks that Doug has cancer and orders Chase to fix the femur and the team to prep him for chemo. Foreman also gets Chase to get a bone biopsy before he closes Doug up.

The bone biopsy is clean, but in post-op Doug starts bleeding out. Taub comes up with a genius idea to grow Doug's cancer so they can find out for sure where it is and then blast it with chemo. Doug's wife is understandably not thrilled with this plan, but before they can administer the cancer growing treatment he goes into cardiac arrest. This time the team is totally stumped. There is nothing that seems to fit loss of balance, pathological hiccups, an air leak between the lungs, a broken femur and tachycardia.

House gets the team to open Doug up and put in a defibrillator so that they can at least keep his heart going long enough to figure out what's wrong with him. Luckily for Doug, House has an epiphany while he's watching Wilson buy gummi bears from the vending machine. It turns out that the one time environmentalist Doug decided to buy flowers for his wife he caught sporotrichosis from them. It's an infection that you can get from the thorns of roses. The good news is that Doug will live to protest another day, the bad news is he'll never doubt his environmental extremism again.

The Return of Chase and Cameron

There's trouble in paradise for Cameron and Chase when Cameron puts off their vacation to work on a case with House. At first House makes Cameron run all of the tests for the patient so she has a legitimate excuse for staying behind from the vacation. But Chase starts to get a little suspicious when Cameron keeps putting off their departure date for trivial things like hiccups.

When Chase confronts her about it, Cameron tells him that there is a reason she can't leave the case but she can't tell him what it is. She asks him to just trust her, Chase is dubious but he agrees. But he also goes to Cuddy to find out if Cameron has expressed any interest in getting back on House's team. When Cuddy assures him the Cameron hasn't mentioned anything, Chase asks Cuddy if she thinks Cameron is in love with House. Whoa, wrong person to ask Chase! Cuddy tells him he's being ridiculous, but then he asks her if she's in love with House. She tells him that's an even more ridiculous question- but she doesn't really answer it. Ha! Gotcha, Cuddy!

House eventually kicks Cameron off his case when he can't figure out her motives for helping him. Rather than heading off on her vacation with Chase, she heads to the clinic to take on some more patients. Cuddy tells Cameron how concerned Chase is about the whole situation and then warns her not to screw up her relationship.

The next day Cameron is still supposed to be on vacation, but House finds her in the ER finishing up some of her old paperwork. House accuses Cameron of wanting to break up with Chase but not having the guts to do it herself. Finally, Cameron admits that she was looking for some thicker socks and she found an engagment ring in Chase's drawer. She doesn't want Chase to propose to her because of some knee jerk reaction over what happened to Kutner. "Oh." Is House's enlightened response.

Chase finds Cameron in the cafeteria the next day and asks her again what's going on. She asked him for some time and he's given her two days but now he wants to know why she's blowing off their vacation to hang around with House. She says that she needs a little more time to figure things out but Chase has had enough being in the dark. He breaks up with Cameron right there in the middle of the cafeteria. Ouch.

After House solves the case of Cameron's patient he comes to find her in the clinic and tell her the good news. He also tells her not to try and dump her boyfriend by dumping cases on him. Cameron insists that she never wanted to dump Chase but House doesn't buy it.

In the end, Cameron finds Chase in the locker room and apologizes to him. She admits everything to him about finding the ring and not wanting him to propose out of fear. But now she's realized that she doesn't really care how or why he proposes as long as he proposes. So Chase gets down on one knee in the middle of the doctors locker room. Aw, how romantic!

Got my Mojo Workin'

House spends much of this episode trying to figure out Cameron's motives for wanting to help out on his case and the real reason behind Wilson's sudden change of diet. Cameron doesn't seem to want her job on the team back now that there's a vacant position, and but she also insists that she doesn't have the hots for House.

Wilson seems to have made the decision to start eating healthier and House can't figure out why. He's not getting any fatter and his medical records are clean. A late night search of Wilson's kitchen also reveals nothing. House is frustrated because he was wrong about Cameron, he didn't see anything coming with Kutner and he has no idea why Wilson is suddenly eating carrots. He thinks he's losing his mind but Wilson insists that sometimes there isn't a rational explanation for things. When a guy you work closely with blows his brains out, it's totally normally to be a little off your game.

In the end, House figures out that Wilson was just trying to screw with him by eating healthy. Wilson knew that after Kutner's death House would need a little normalcy back in his life. And what could be more normal than Wilson screwing with House and House figuring it out?

The episode ends with House/Hugh Laurie playing some sweet, sweet music on the piano and harmonica. And then he stops, looks up and sees Cutthroat Bitch standing in the middle of his living room. Looks like he's not losing it after all...

Tags: House, Environmentalist, Chase, Cameron, Season 5

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