House - Episode 20 (Season Three): “House Training”
Tonight’s episode of House was primarily a character episode for Foreman, and other than some good House/Wilson (and sometimes Cuddy) moments, was a spectacularly lackluster show. Even the return of Charles Dutton as Foreman’s father couldn’t help. This week’s House medical review, chock full of spoilers, follows…
A 28 year-old inner city girl is playing a game of three-card monte when she suddenly suffers from abulia (a loss of will, shown as the inability to make a decision) and collapses. She is admitted to the hospital and Dr. Foreman explains that she has had a TIA (transient ischemic attack). He suspects the TIA was caused by drug use or toxin exposure, but the patient denies both and her drug screen comes back negative. Cameron suspects a clot from the heart and wants to do a bubble study (House told Cameron to do the bubble study, but it seems to have gotten lost in shuffle, which is a shame because it would have shown the correct diagnosis). Foreman still suspects drugs or contaminated drugs, and when he and Chase search her apartment they find a crack pipe. She insists the pipe was a boyfriend’s. The pipe shows evidence of arsenic, so her hair is tested but only shows a trace amount — not enough for arsenic poisoning.
While talking with Foreman, the patient develops a nasty cough which proceeds to a bloody cough. A CT scan of the lungs shows a large mass. The initial diagnosis is (wait for it…) autoimmune disease , including giant cell arteritis or lupus vasculitis. Foreman starts her on steroids. When he examines her eyes a short time later, he notes scleral icterus (the whites of the eyes are yellow), a sign of jaundice. He diagnoses her with liver failure (presumably he ran some other tests first). Foreman now suspects that her problem is not autoimmune, but instead a rare cancer: lymphomatoid granulomatosis. He recommends whole body radiation for treatment and manages to talk House into agreeing with him. In fact, House volunteers to get informed consent from the patient (because he wants to meet the patient who dislikes Foreman so much).
While House is obtaining informed consent, the patient has another episode of abulia then loses consciousness. House schedules her for the radiation anyway. When Foreman is examining her after the radiation therapy, he hears a new heart murmur. At the same time, the patient begins to scream in pain from the pressure from the blood pressure cuff. These two symptoms together tell the team that the patient has developed sepsis (an overwhelming bacterial infection of the body). At this point, the team decides that there is nothing that they can do for her. Foreman explains the situation to the patient and admits that his decision to give total body radiation wiped out her immune system and essentially killed her. She gets mad at him (understandably), but eventually they have a heart to heart and he sits by her side as she dies. In the end, House performs an autopsy and determines that she died of a Staph infection from a skin scratch caused by her bra clasp.
Medically, this episode wasn’t horrible, but wasn’t great either. The medicine on the show always seems to suffer when they have a “special guest star” or a “character episode”, and this was no exception.
- A TIA (sometime called a “mini-stroke”) is abnormal is a 28 year-old and they should have performed a more intensive work-up, at least a head CT, carotid doppler, and echocardiogram to look for treatable causes. Actually, they did perform the echocardiogram (as part of Cameron’s bubble study), but never saw fit to mention it again. This would have shown that something wrong with the heart valves from the beginning*.
- The jump from autoimmune to rare cancer was unintuitive, and I doubt that any radiation oncologist would give radiation treatments without a definitive diagnosis, or at the very least a signed informed consent form.
- My reading on lymphomatoid granulomatosis shows that there is no clear best treatment. Steroids can work (and the patient was already on steroids), and a recent strategy has been to use antiviral drugs. Radiation can be used for localized disease — which means that it would be very specifically aimed radiation, very different from the total body radiation the script described.
- The timing of the rest of the show was off. The radiation knocked out her immune system far faster than it should (I would expect several days), and then the infection flared up very quickly as well.
- An increased heart murmur can be a sign of infection (endocarditis), but linking the pain from the blood pressure cuff to sepsis was a stretch.
- More importantly, I don’t know why they wouldn’t at least start her on some antibiotics to treat the infection. Immune suppressed patients have survived infections — even sepsis — before and antibiotics played an important role. They throw antibiotics at patients at the drop of a hat, and now when they have an actual infection, they don’t?
The medical mystery was started out good (abulia), but went downhill with each revelation and earns a C+. The solution was something that should have been caught in the first place, by a test they ran! This gets a C-. The medicine was haphazard and — more than usual — clearly just served to get the plot from point A to point B. It wasn’t horrible, just maddeningly average, which is not what I expect from House. It earns a meagerC. The soap opera was enjoyable, particularly the House/Wilson and Wilson/Cuddy scenes. The Foreman scenes felt like they were trying too hard. Still, the soap opera earns a B+.
The previous House review
A list of all prior House reviews
April 24th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Incidentally, on an almost unrelated subject, except that I love your “sanity checking the medicine in media”, have you ever done a medical review of the movie “Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle?” There’s a scene in it in a hospital, and I’d love to know if the characters were being more-or-less reasonable.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
I was also a bit disappointed in this episode–I get that sometimes, patients have to die for something resembling verisimilitude, but in this case, they seemed to go to, “All is lost, the end is nigh” much faster than seems in character… and much faster than I would hope doctors would in the case of a mistake. And in the initial course of an examination, wouldn’t someone have removed her bra and noticed a hole in her skin as big as the one showed by the autopsy? I mean, if they’d introduced that and then fatally ignored it, it might be easier to buy, but not seeing an open sore, apparently infected, that’s about the size of a pinky nail? Seems a bit much.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Official Comment
Ian,
That’s a good idea. I actually have that movie Netflixed right now, so I’ll have to re-watch that scene. As I recall, it was more than a little over the top.
Barbara,
You’re right. This is another episode that could have been solved earlier by a thorough physical exam.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Another quality review posted the same day. Can’t expect more than that. Not that I’m a doctor or anything, but I’d give the medicine an F in this episode. Something’s wrong with the patient so let’s nuke her immune system? (From orbit to be sure) I’d think running a few more tests or say doing a full body search and finding a pretty obvious and suspicious wound on the patient’s back should come first.
As for the Foreman scenes, they would be there because they’re actually going to do something with the main characters (Foreman in particular) by the end of the season on May 29. If they don’t come up with some great shift by say the middle of the fourth season, I’d say it could be the last. To make the obvious comparison, Sherlock Holmes films could be formulaic, but unlike House, they had the luxury of changing scenery, changing casts and changing situations. House isn’t e.r. and it isn’t Grey’s Anatomy (thank the Sanjaya). Only so much it can do without essentially changing the whole show.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
Shouldn’t there other things that would have shown that she had a rampaging staph infection, fever perhaps? Checking the blood counts would reveal some sort of infection to look at first.
There is also the off chance that the staph would have killed her no matter what. VRSA perhaps.
I was also surprised that they didn’t at least try with the antibiotics.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
I was pretty surprised at the TBI. As you say, Scott, isn’t that kind of a radical approach? Like you, I also was surprised at the idea that they wouldn’t even TRY antibiotics. “They work with your immune system,” says Foreman. Yeah, but, where I work, we do stem-cell transplants. The patients’ immune systems are totally knocked out by the TBI they get beforehand, and sometimes they develop infections. The oncologists still give them antibiotics and certainly don’t just give up on them without trying everything to control the infection. Speaking of BMT, wouldn’t that have been an option for her? I didn’t hear anyone talk about trying to find a donor (not enough time, maybe, to find an unrelated donor, but one of the grandparents could be a partial match, no?). Overall, it seemed like the writers thought, “how can we kill a patient and make it Foreman’s fault,” and went from there.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
When it comes to diagnostic medicine….wouldn’t the fact that even if there is a cearly able Doctor with regular credentials they wouldn’t be able to solve cases that Dr. House and his team receive.
I understand the want to systematially annalise the medicine and grade it to give a representation of the tv show; but tv shows arn’t built on the guy that dies before all the rest of the warriors, or on the doctor who is medium in originality, but the one who is so superior that you can’t help but know what direction he’s going in.
The fact that Dr. House is above anything or everythnig we would think of doing, makes the show great, I for one love the fact that I don’t always know where he’s going, and it may be possibly unfair to give a grading to a case so compleatly unorthadox. (Meaning every week, not just this impaticular episode)
By the way, I love this site and there reviews.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Sorry, forgot to add that, once they decided it was cancer and that she needed radiation, shouldn’t Wilson have taken over the case. Yeah, sure, House and his flock seem to jacks-of-all-specialties, but she REALLY needed a REAL oncologist.
April 25th, 2007 at 12:13 am
Correct me if I’m wrong, but they said they did an LP on her in the middle of the episode didn’t they? That would’ve also been a point where they could have caught the infection seeing as how they are poking a needle into her back.
April 25th, 2007 at 12:17 am
I dunno, it just felt like we already covered the angle of Foreman doesn’t like poor people on the street because that’s where he comes from and doesn’t want to go back blah blah blah in the first season with Victoria (rabies lady). Probably why this felt forced. That and I still laugh or roll my eyes at Foreman wandering into an unknown and unclean environment without a mask. Or wander in period. But since it’s a staple of House and serves for some of the more amusing moments I guess I can’t complain too much.
April 25th, 2007 at 12:27 am
I guess I thought that this episode was designed as a deliberate counter to the highly intellectual medicine-as-mystery-to-be-solved format of most. The writers needed to set us up with a scenario whereby our doctors not only are unable to save the patient, but are in fact quite possibly the cause of the death, and are forced to deal with the consequences. Also, the writers tend to rotate emotional focii, and this time it was Foreman’s turn. Thus, hey presto, we get Foreman at the center of an emotional rather than intellectual episode.
All that in mind, I enjoyed this episode, and I was glad the patient *did* die at the end, for the same reason I’m always glad when the defendant is acquitted in Law & Order — it gives the show some credibility, and it means you can’t *quite* always be sure the good guys will win.
April 25th, 2007 at 1:29 am
The doctors had done a spinal tap, but I remember Chase reporting offhandedly that it was clear. Sounds odd, almost like they wanted us to miss it on purpose.
April 25th, 2007 at 1:48 am
I may be wrong, but I didn’t hear any of the doctors ordering blood cultures. I’ve looked at seasons 1 and 2 again, and it seems they order blood cultures on everyone. Wouldn’t that have shown the raging infection?
April 25th, 2007 at 1:58 am
Even if they nuked her immune system, couldn’t they do a bone marrow transplant? Replace the immune system, give her a fighting chance? Sounds like the kind of thing House would do.
April 25th, 2007 at 3:16 am
When they performed the LP shouldn’t they have noticed the site of infection? I just don’t understand how they missed such an obvious diagnosis. Whatever happened to looking for horses instead of zebras… they were no where close to exhausting their diagnostic tools before they decided to give the patient radiation. Did they even test for ANA, I don’t understand how they ruled out infection so soon when they didn’t have any evidence to support their differentials diagnosises.
April 25th, 2007 at 5:16 am
Shouldnt whole body radiation kill off the bacteria in her blood as well? Or is it not strong enough?
But it was able to kill off her lymphocytes and destroy her immune system, shouldnt it kill bacteria as well? Bacteria might be a bit more resistant to radiation due to its circular DNA but considering the amount of radiation used for cancer treatment, it shouldnt make much of a difference should it?
April 25th, 2007 at 5:58 am
I think this show is trying too hard to be edgy and cool on both the medical and soap opera fronts. I find it hard to believe that no one saw any signs of infection before they decided to irratidate her body, or that there was a feverish need to do something immediately and something so drastic and dangerous without going through every possible option. The last time they tried to irradiate a patient was the Munchausen’s women in Deception and they were wrong about that one too. Chase’s suggestion that the patient might have ADD and that could give them a clue as to why she was phasing out is too ridiciulous to even discuss.
The soap opera aspects are becoming ridiculous. Is everyone on sex hormones? I found Chase telling Cameron that he was going to keep asking her every week even though she kept telling him she wasn’t interested to be creepy. What happened to ‘No mean no’?
April 25th, 2007 at 6:56 am
Hi, I have a question regarding this episode tonight. Would Xigris have been a valid route to take once sepsis set in? I thought they were going to use that drug, but then they just gave up and let the patient die, and I thought Xigris was used specifically for cases of severe sepsis, which is what this patient had.
Or was it really just too late to do anything at all?
Additionally, wouldn’t the patient have been on some kind of broad-spectrum antibiotic when she was originally admitted (before the auto-immune diagnosis)? I thought most patients (especially if they have an open IV line) were given a drug like Zosyn as a standard treatment in a hospital. Wouldn’t that have prevented the Staph, or at least started to repel the infection (since House implied it was just simple Staph, nothing like MRSA)?
April 25th, 2007 at 7:08 am
First, it was good that their patient died for once. i was waiting for that to happen since about mid-2nd-season. but then, how they did it in this episode is ridiculous. Not only have they become average (or below average) doctors all of a sudden, but the show was also boring. The differential diagnosis process (which is usually the best part of the show) was cut down to two scenes, where Foreman just rampaged about something and got his way in the end. As i recall, House contributed next to nothing to the differential (why?).
If assume the reason for changing the usual structure of the episodes (and the proportion drama to medicine) was to develop Foreman’s character further. That however doesnt justify spending almost half the episode being sad and self-doubting (underlined with ultra-melancholic music, terrible!). I excpect better from this show.
Last, it’s not boring if every episode runs along the same scheme. it is (or was) a very good scheme, and changing it can only worsen the show. how was that? never change a winning zebra?
April 25th, 2007 at 7:22 am
Official Comment
LPs are done low on the back, so it’s likely they would not have noticed a wound under her bra strap. But you’d think the wound would have been painful when she developed her “super pain sense” once the sepsis kicked in. If the blood pressure cuff hurt, you’d think an open wound would as well.
It seems (to make a slight analogy) that the team went into the total body radiation without any exit strategy in mind. If they wiped out her immune system, she’s probably going to need a bone marrow transplant — which they should have arranged ahead of time since that’s the rate-limiting step.
Xigris would have been a legitimate choice of medication. After all, they tried it once back in season 2 (”Humpty Dumpty“) — incorrectly, so it would have been nice to see them use it correctly now.
I doubt they would have empirically given the patient a broad-spectrum antibiotic as a standard treatment. That’s a good way to get resistant germs. Some surgeons give them reflexively after surgery (particularly orthopedic surgery), but rarely just for an IV.
Though it was a community-acquired Staph, it could still have been MRSA. There has been a rash (no pun intended) of community-acquired MRSA here in Illinois, and I believe across the nation as well. It’s not nearly as nasty as hospital-acquired MRSA, though still resistant to common antibiotics. It’s still no excuse for not treating her infection.
April 25th, 2007 at 7:36 am
Thanks for the quick and thorough review. I found the medicine pretty poor in this episode, and the defeatist approach by the team quite annoying and unbelievably out of character. Just the things I picked up: People can have sepsis without a fever, but Cameron specifically said her white count was ok and that there were no signs of infection, fairly early on. If there had been any indication of an infection they should have run cultures - urine, sputum, blood. Foreman was hovering around with his stethoscope - why wouldn’t he have noticed the small but nasty looking lesion on her back when listening to her lungs? Why didn’t they even try antibiotics? And as a previous poster mentioned, why didn’t they try a bone marrow transplant? Heck, they can get hearts and livers within a few hours (on this show :-)); it should be comparatively easy to find a bone marrow donor.
April 25th, 2007 at 7:40 am
Scott - I wrote my post before your latest post came up. We’ve got a lot of Community Acquired MRSA in my neck of the woods but fortunately it still responds to Vancomycin - which can be murder on the kidneys, but since when did that ever stop the team? People can live with dialysis.
April 25th, 2007 at 7:40 am
So I’m assuming next week’s episode will deal with the malpractice suit that will destroy all their careers? It looked like House was just bored with the case so he told Foreman, “Yeah, just do whatever you want.”
A boring episode all around.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:00 am
OK, correct me if I’m wrong, but the patient would not have been wearing her bra under her hospital gown, so the open wound would not have been covered up. Did no one listen to her heart/lungs/whatever with the old “lean forward, take a deep breath” routine and wonder what the hole was in her back? And before they noticed that the pressure from a BP cuff hurt, did she not mention that it hurt like hell just to lie there? Pain from bedsores, diabetic wounds, etc., is almost intolerable…unless she was dead from the feet up and completely uncommunicative, I would think she might have mentioned it. I’m just an accountant, but this does not sound like good medicine.
On a different note, thrilled that Cameron and Chase are over. This is not Entertainment Tonight, for pity’s sake.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Hm, patients on oncology treatments are always at risk of neutropenic spesis anyway, and there are protocols on how to treat neutropenic sepsis - broad spectrum antibiotics, etc. And most of the time, when caught within 1 hour of presentation, neutropenic sepsis can be treated. I guess they could always explain that they caught the sepsis too late.
Was just wondering why they didn’t start her on antibiotics the moment they caught infection. You are right, the Staph. infection flared up too quickly post-radiotherapy.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:20 am
Joey, bone marrow transplants require compatible donors. Even had a compatible donor been at hand, marrow transplants are extremely expensive, excruciatingly painful and in and of themselves depend on immunosuppression. She would have been dead from sepsis long before new marrow produced significant numbers of monocytes. It would have amounted to an expensive way of sticking pins in a dying person. Therefore, I am surprised House didn’t do it. :)
April 25th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Peter, you’re exactly right. This is of course true for all organ donations, yet on this show they’ve managed to find hearts and livers literally within hours or days. The advantage of bone marrow donors is that they’re usually alive, so there is a much greater chance of finding a compatible donor than for solid organ transplants. As you said, in real life it would be a lengthy, complicated procedure with no certain outcome, but since when has that ever stopped the Team? And money doesn’t seem to be an object either.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:57 am
I know nothing about the medicine involved but the whole episode seemed so disjointed to me. It all seemed so badly handled and I know little about it. I’m glad to see that my instincts were not off base. I pretty much agree with the ratings.
It appears to have been a vehicle to attempt to garner Eps an Emmy nomination and if that is the case it fell flat. I have nothing against the actor or the character but it just didn’t cut it for me.
The House/Wilson scenes were funny and I thought Chase was treating Foreman a whole lot better than Foreman treated him after his own ‘mistake’ of Season 2. Off course the argument can be made that Chase knows what it feels like when back then, Foreman had no idea.
I don’t mind the Chase/Cameron storyline but I believe his ‘weekly’ reminder to be a call back to Occam’s razor when she gave Chase the ’sex talk’. Taken out of context it is funny but had a man said that to a woman people would be screaming ‘harrasment’! She never should have done that and now she’s just paying for the fall back from it. Aside from that there is a lot worse things Chase can do than a gentle reminder once a week that he gives a crap about her but just as I don’t understand what Cameron saw in House..I have no idea what Chase sees in Cameron. He can do better.
April 25th, 2007 at 9:01 am
At first I thought the medical part was weak, but as I thought about it more it makes sense. I think this episode was done to show that they do make mistakes. Critical mistakes that led to someone dying. It reinforced the fact that sometimes they are looking so hard for an esoteric solution they miss the obvious stuff.
April 25th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Scott,
I may have misunderstood, but you seemed to imply that the total body radiation was given without consent. If I remember correctly, when the nurses rushed in, and after House told them what medication to give the patient, he threw down the consent form and said something like “And give her this, she’ll want to sign it when she wakes up”, implying that the latest abulia episode would resolve any doubts she had. Again if I recall correctly, she was awake during the radiation treatment. So I think its fair to assume that she did eventually sign the consent form.
April 25th, 2007 at 9:54 am
Official Comment
Gary,
That’s certainly a reasonable interpretation. I just assumed House was being House and having her sign the form after the procedure.
April 25th, 2007 at 11:32 am
But, but, (sputter), I’m with blinky here. The dog’s name is Hector. Surely this anagram aspect of the show alone made for genius.
And you too can anagram your name if you have ego (sorry)
http://wordsmith.org/anagram/
April 25th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
IMO, the scene at the end with Foreman and his mother was quite good, - as was the “Aren’t you ever gonna leave?” - “No”. But then there was the weekly reminder of Chase’s having fallen for Cameron, which was lame and unnecessary - a pained look at her would have sufficed. However, the House-Wilson-his ex-wife were pretty good. And now I finally know why Wilson reminds me of Niles from “Frasier” (you know, the one who played Kelsey Grammar’s character’s brother) - They have the same ex-wife! :)
Also - my favourite quote from this week’s show was Cuddy stating at the vernisage: “There’s no way they could have done that without damaging the large intestine!” (or something to that effect).
Regards, MikeB
April 25th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Hi everyone
I’m sorry, what I am going to say has nothing to do whit this particular episode, but, this is the most fitted place if I want my question to be answered. Many times we’ve seen House kneeling, or seeting normally, with both legs flexed. How can he do this but can’t want without limping ??
Thanks for answering this question, and thanks a million times for these highly interesting reviews !
April 25th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Come to think of it, if they made the case a viral infection, would it seem more plausible that the TBI seals her fate? Though then I would not know how to tie the lymphocyte mass into the case.
And it seems that this killed-the-patient episode plot & story flow is worse than when Chase killed that other patient.
April 25th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Mushing with the huskies?
April 26th, 2007 at 12:26 am
This may be stating the obvious but…
We don’t have vicodin in Australia but looking it up it seems to be a combination of hydrocodone with acetaminophen (paracetamol here) - there is a big focus on the addictive/abuse potential of hydrocodone but why isn’t anyone worried about the potential liver damage House may be getting from chronic overuse of acetaminophen (im guessing he has more than 4g/day)?
April 26th, 2007 at 12:39 am
just taking the opportunity to thank the writer of this website for their many reviews. and for creating a more idiot free environment than the imdb for episode discussion.
April 26th, 2007 at 11:50 am
I was quite disappointed in this episode as well. I felt this episode had pretty bad medicine when they refused to do anything for her. Yes, she’s septic.. but couldn’t they at least have tried an antibiotic? Some antibiotics work by inhibiting the formation of bacterial cell walls.
And if they were truly worried about her having no immune system, why couldn’t they have given her some intravenous IGg (Immunoglobulin, of for that matter, a simple blood transplant?) Granted, I’m only a first year pharmacy student, but I felt that there was much more they could have done.
April 26th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Official Comment
I meant to mention this earlier, but it slipped my mind. How did Foreman punch the wall hard enough to break it, but only injured the tip of one finger? I was fully expecting a boxer’s fracture, because punching the wall like that is a classic way to get one.
April 26th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Having worked in radiation therapy for years, I can tell you of only one case where we did radiation withtout some type of tissue diagnosis (pathology) or at least X-ray confirmation. We had a patient with a skin cancer that absolutely REFUSED to submit to a tissue diagnosis because she was afraid of needles. We explained to her that we could be doing radiation unnecessarily, but she didn’t care. She would rather have the treatment than deal with needles, if you can believe that. We made her sign a consent to treatment, and that she understood what she was doing.
I doubt they would have done it in this instance, most especially not TBI (total body irradiation.)
April 27th, 2007 at 8:27 am
Given that some modern automated hematology analyzers can detect immature granulocytes (some even can count them directly), have they actually been doing a thorough blood analysis?
April 27th, 2007 at 9:45 am
When my wife saw Foreman hit the wall she said that he broke his hand. I said that the wall gave too much. It was a hole in sheet rock with no stud there. Unless he was frail I couldn’t see much injury beyond a bruise.
We both said Whisky Tango Foxtrot when we saw the break at the tip of a finger.
This episode was fairly crappy all around and my only hope is that its being used as a setup for future episodes.
April 28th, 2007 at 12:55 am
Concerning the whole medical scenario, it’s actually based on a true story, at least according to one of the writers. Pretty screwy, huh?
April 28th, 2007 at 2:26 am
Have you heard/seen the Canadian series ReGenesis? It involves cutting-edge biotech and has really deep science. I’d like to see your take on the show, though, as I have only little lay knowledge of the subject matter.
April 29th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Just in case you didn’t know, Doris Egan wrote the House episode “House training”, and she has a livejournal blog. You might want to check it out. She labels it “Tightrope Walker”, but in the web address is
http://tightropegirl.livejournal.com/
Personally, I’m disappointed with House episodes. They seem to be turning into soap operas.
April 30th, 2007 at 4:10 am
Perhaps one of the actual doctors can comment on this, but most people make fists wrong when they punch. You shouldn’t curl your fingers into your palms because the force on the flat part of the fist can break the end-most joint. That’s what I gathered happened to Foreman.
April 30th, 2007 at 4:18 am
Bah. I don’t know quite what I was thinking when I posted the above. Ignore any (wrong) commentary on how to do it properly. Basic idea still flies, though…if you don’t make the fist right, and strike with the little/ring finger knuckles first, the fist can compress and break the end of the fingers.
May 1st, 2007 at 5:23 am
Scott, I have a question for you relating to episode 14. Apologies for posting here but I don’t know if you check posts for old episodes, and this one just screened tonight in New Zealand. I’ve quoted the bit from television without pity:
It’s neurology time, and Foreman’s got Hannah’s head screwed into some horrible device while he shoots her up with some proteins that should heighten her sensitivity to pain and then drills into her skull. “A response should indicate sarcoma,” he says. “What does it feel like?” Hannah asks. “It…hurts,” Foreman says.
I had a proximal-type epithelioid sarcoma in 2005. It’s a rare cancer with little info so I was intrigued to hear it mentioned and wondered if you knew anything about what test he was trying to do. Mine was diagnosed only after the tumour was taken out and I still get 4 monthly CTs to check for any recurrance. Is there another way to see if it’s there?
Thanks
Kate (who always reads your reviews after House screens and loves them!)
May 5th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
After they found out they killed her immune system couldn’t they give her a blood transfusion? Even the small amount of white cells from the donor blood could have helped save her life.
May 14th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Only recently got into this series due to my Aussie girlfriend and now I’m hopelessly hooked. Superb show and, without wanting to be a praise-gushing idiot, this site is a superb companion to it. We’re only half way thorugh series 3 in the Uk so I’m kind of peeking ahead but I can’t help it.
As fascinating as the episodes usually are, it’s a treat to read your reviews. Love the way you rate the shows for the mystery, the accuracy AND the soap aspect and your opinions are as entertaining as they are enlightening. Also, the comments you get are superb. Some smart people out there!
So please keep up the great work. Series 4 has been commissioned so there’s a way to go yet for you. My personal favourite episode is Three Stories. Was wondering if there’s one you particularly enjoy and why.
Thanks again!
August 15th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
When I heard the Cameron, Foreman, and Chase were all leaving, I was really depressed. But, after seeing this episode again, I realize that it’s for the best. Frankly, I’ve grown really tired of the ducklings, and by the end of this episode, I was just like “Go away.” Anyone else feel them getting old? I saw the previews of the new season, it looked really good!
Great reviews, by the way!
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