Recent lottery winner Cyrus comes to PPTH after his leg becomes paralyzed in the middle of his mission to be reunited with his long-lost love now that he's super-rich. Fortunately for him, she shows up at PPTH shortly after he's admitted and seemingly wants nothing to do with his money. Unfortunately for him, he ends up having not one, but three tumors that are three different types of cancer. Oh, and that woman was actually a fake sent by Cyrus's cousin and best friend to try to get more of Cyrus's money even though Cyrus was willing to give the guy ten million dollars just for being his friend. House decides that Cyrus must have something else wrong with him to cause him to develop these tumors, and so pumps Cyrus full of tumor-growing drugs in the hopes of finding out what as quickly as possible. Not only does that not cause any new tumors to form, but it also actually shrinks the existing ones. Ultimately, House figures out that Cyrus's problems are all due to another tumor -- a teratoma, best known to me as those horrible, horrible tumors that can grow hair and teeth. Cyrus's teratoma does not have hair and teeth, but it is full of brain cells, which have somehow leaked into Cyrus's bloodstream, causing his immune system to attack them and also the cells in his actual brain for good measure. This also somehow caused all those cancers, but Cyrus will be fine once the teratoma is removed. And he has something to live for, as his real long-lost love finally shows up at PPTH.
While all this is going on, we also have the B, C and D plots. Hadley is being negative and miserable and House is determined to find out why, only to realize that it might have something to do with the fact that her nearly-over life totally sucks. Chase tries to get Foreman to de-stress at work, claiming that he's been much happier ever since he stopped having sex with tons of girls, but Foreman can't de-stress and it turns out that Chase can't stop having sex with tons of girls, either. And Cuddy is being sued by her own mother, who is slow to recover from her hip replacement replacement operation and wants PPTH to pay for it with several thousand dollars and most likely the revocation of Cuddy and House's medical licenses. In the end, it turns out that Murphy Brown doesn't really want to sue her daughter, but was hoping that Cuddy and House would unite against her and get back together again. It doesn't work.
Cheery music plays as Donal Logue, bouquet in hand, paces nervously in front of a small house before ringing the doorbell. Jennifer Williams answers, and Donal introduces himself as Cyrus Harry, who spent a "long weekend at the Jersey Shore" 23 years ago with a woman named Jennifer Williams. He's trying to find her again. Clearly, that weekend wasn't very memorable, since Cyrus can't even tell if the woman at the door is the right Jennifer Williams or not. I'm going to go with "not," since this one slams the door in his face. He crosses her name off the list and heads back to his limo, telling his chauffeur they're going to Philadelphia and the Jennifer Williams. The chauffeur grumbles at this, even though he's apparently making six figures at this job, thanks to his boss being his very generous cousin, and says he doesn't understand why Cyrus is wasting so much time on a memory of a woman when he has enough money to get plenty of real ones. Cousin Phil starts to apologize for being cranky, but Cyrus isn't listening because he suddenly can't move his leg.
House passes out the new patient file, saying that something seems to be wrong with Cyrus's brain, but all tests have come back normal. Taub zeroes in on the important part of Cyrus's medical history: he just won $42 million in the lottery after a lifetime of eking out a living as a refrigerator repairman. Taub thinks Cyrus is really lucky, but House figures that Cyrus will blow the money just like other lottery winners he's read about, saying money can't buy happiness and Cyrus was clearly miserable enough before the win to buy lottery tickets in the first place. "Our level of happiness is set. It's in our DNA," Hadley agrees. "It's like there's two of me," House notes. True. Why have her back on the show at all, then? One House is plenty. Cuddy suddenly enters the room and informs House that her mother is threatening to sue PPTH, saying their poor care slowed her recovery time. House cheerfully says that's fantastic, as he now gets to still deal with Cuddy's mother while also not getting to have sex with Cuddy. While he does that, he sends Chase and Foreman to check out Cyrus's workshop and Taub and Hadley to check out Cyrus.
House takes some Vicodin, saying they are necessary to prevent the pain in his ass he's expecting. Cuddy ignores him and explains that her mother is recovering slowly from her hip replacement and having trouble moving, so Cuddy offered to let her move in with her. This caused a huge fight for some reason, and now Murphy Brown wants to sue PPTH, which could lead to the revelation of all the not-quite-medically-ethical stuff House and Cuddy did to her. Which means they could both get in serious trouble, up to and including having their medical licenses taken away. Is that really such a threat? Hadley went to jail for killing her own brother and she got her medical license back in three seconds. Murphy Brown wants to discuss a settlement, but insists on meeting with both Cuddy and House. Which means House will have to play nice in front of Cuddy's mother while Cuddy tries to talk her mother out of ruining her own daughter's career. Wow, this seems really complicated. I guess they should have just let Murphy die after all. House has no intention of going to any meetings.
Taub asks Cyrus about any new rich people hobbies he may have picked up that exposed him to toxic chemicals, including drugs. Cyrus insists that he will not turn into one of those lottery winners who loses everything. To that end, he says he's living the same life and eating the same food he did before he had money. "Crappy canned food," Phil notes, getting Taub's attention. He asks how often Cyrus eats canned meals. Cyrus says that pretty much all of his meals are from cans, and he orders them "by the case." What food are we talking about here, exactly? Spam? Chef Boyardee? Pheasant in a can? Is it really that difficult and expensive to buy and prepare real food? Even those Hungry Man frozen meals for single manchildren would be better than this "crappy canned food" Cyrus has been eating all his life.
p>Chase and Foreman check out Cyrus's grim, disgusting workshop. For whatever reason, Chase decides to call Foreman out for being "repressed," whatever that's supposed to mean, and unable to change his ways Chase, on the other hand, claims to have changed his life in the last month. He is no longer sleeping with random women all the time and says he's happier than ever and ready for "something real" to come along. Yes, and then get fired by the show's producers and written off the show and her marriage to Chase for the stupidest of reasons. Sounds fun! Chase challenges Foreman to get through one differential diagnosis session without House getting under his skin. Foreman asks how he's supposed to prove that. Chase doesn't seem to have any ideas, but he does find a can of chemicals from China that are probably full of deadly poison.In a shot from very high up for no good reason, Chase and Taub tell House that Cyrus could either be suffering from inhaling evil Chinese solvent toxins or heavy metal poisoning from all those cans of food he eats. Hadley says the treatment for either diagnosis is the same thing: chelation. House orders the Cottages to do something else that isn't chelation, because that way they'll be able to find out what is actually wrong with Cyrus. Narrowing it down to two possibilities isn't good enough for House, and they should have known that. Foreman argues that chelation is safer for the patient than the treatments House is suggesting, but then is forced to drop it in order to prove to Chase that he can interact with House without getting angry inside. Or something. I'm really not sure what this stupid C-plot thing between Chase and Foreman is about other than a way to fill some time.
Taub and Hadley make their way into Cyrus's room as Hadley says she decided to cancel the dialysis machine House ordered and do chelation instead. When it works, they'll just lie to House and say Cyrus had heavy metal poisoning. Yes, because House will totally fall for that. It's not like he's a brilliant doctor who pays attention to even the most insignificant detail or anything. Hadley seems to think that even if House does find out what she did, he'll just be "impressed" that she defied him. Since when was House impressed by that? He likes it when his Cottages defy other doctors. Not so much when they defy him. It doesn't matter anyway, as the chelation therapy has also been canceled -- by Cuddy, who just deauthorized all treatment for House's patient.
Hadley informs House that Cuddy has made it so that they can't do anything for Cyrus until House attends the meeting with Cuddy, Murphy Brown, and Murphy Brown's lawyer. Well, that's a great way to make sure that someone doesn't sue the hospital for poor treatment and keep your medical license: by putting another patient in danger by basically refusing to let your staff treat him for what may well be a fatal condition. Not to mention that the patient has plenty of money for a lawyer and nothing to lose. Way to learn from your mistakes, Cuddy. Taub says House has no choice but to attend the meeting so they can go back to saving Cyrus. That sounds like a dare to House.
thing we see, Cyrus is being prepared to be discharged from PPTH altogether. He is understandably confused, and Taub can't think of a lie that will explain why a man who still can't move his leg and has plenty of money to pay for care is being told to leave the hospital. Hadley tells Cyrus not to worry; he's just a victim of a power struggle between his doctor and the Dean of Medicine, and she's sure it will all be resolved within twenty minutes after Cyrus is kicked out of PPTH. I'm sorry, but that's not going to make me feel better, and it doesn't do much for Cyrus, either. He should take his millions of dollars and hop over to St. Sebastian's. And to a lawyer's office. And then Cuddy can have meetings with two former patients about the shitty treatment they received at her hospital.
Before Cyrus can get too upset, though, a blonde woman appears in the doorway. "Jennifer?" he asks. "It's good to see you," she says. She claims that she read about Cyrus in the paper and got to New Jersey from Virginia as soon as possible. Wait, she read in the paper that Cyrus won $42 million and then was admitted to PPTH? Why would they put that in there? What a weird article. Phil wonders if Jennifer would have come if Cyrus didn't suddenly have a lot of money. Jennifer admits that this does look bad, but she just wanted to see Cyrus and say hello. He's so happy to see her again that he doesn't seem too bothered about the timing. She runs over to embrace him, only for him to barf all over her suit. That and his suddenly shaking hand leads Hadley to diagnose him with a focal seizure. Now PPTH is really going to look bad when they kick him out.Taub fills House in on Cyrus's current condition. The seizure means there is definitely something wrong with his brain, as well as that it's not due to heavy metal poisoning or inhaled toxins. House refuses to care about any of this because he's still sulking over Cuddy, who marches in and says that she'll let him treat his patient if House agrees to meet her "halfway." House returns to reading his issue of Celeb (Celeb: for when you want to use People but not enough to pay for the rights) and demands that Cuddy cut his Clinic hours which he never does anyway, giving him three parking spots to each other so he can park like an asshole across them all, and give him three pairs of her underwear that he can use as sails for his new boating hobby. Oh, I wonder if he was inspired by his last patient? Cuddy gives up and tells House to do whatever he wants because she is done playing games with him. Even the one that she started.
Free to treat Cyrus again, the Cottages return to the meeting room, where Chase has Foreman hooked up to a blood pressure monitor to test whether or not Foreman is holding in repressed anger at House. This delights House, who tries to elicit a response on Foreman's monitor by getting right in his face and saying that Foreman's theory that Cyrus has Lyme disease is stupid. Foreman's blood pressure doesn't change more than a few points. House starts in on Foreman's missing brother, but that doesn't raise Foreman's blood pressure, either.
Taub tries to diagnose Cyrus, but House and Hadley would rather talk about how miserable he's going to be whether they help him or not, because money doesn't buy happiness and his dream girl is sure to turn out to be a horrible gold-digger. Also, Hadley thinks Cyrus has herpes encephalitis. House agrees, and tells them to confirm it with an EEG while starting him on herpes medicine. He then checks in on Foreman's BP, which Chase disappointedly reports hasn't changed the entire time. House finds that odd, since he unplugged the lead from Foreman's arm to the machine a while ago. Foreman angrily removes the cuff, having been busted for trying to cheat his repressed rage test. He, Chase, and Taub leave, but House tells Hadley to stay behind so he can ask her why she's so determined to believe that Cyrus won't be able to be happy or his relationship with Jennifer won't work out. Of course, Hadley isn't interested in talking to him.
Jennifer and Cyrus are giggling away in the EEG room, so I guess he didn't tell her that his doctors think he has herpes. Hadley tells Jennifer she has to leave the room when they do the EEG, and Jennifer says she might as well leave and head back to Virginia. Cyrus won't hear of it, saying he can pay for her to stay at a nice hotel. Maybe he can put her up at the hotel House stayed at after Cuddy dumped him, now with special safety railings to prevent assholes from jumping into the pool from the eleventh floor! Jennifer refuses, saying she only came to see Cyrus for the day, not to take his money. In the end, she agrees to stay for another few days, but in a motel at her own expense.
House limps into Wilson's office with the EEG results, which apparently show that Cyrus's brain is just fine despite all of his neurological symptoms. They found signs of "metabolic distress" on the EEG, though, so they scanned Cyrus's abdomen and found a mass in his pancreas. Thus, Wilson the cancer doctor has to take a look. He says the mass looks like cancer to him, and the rest of Cyrus's symptoms must be from paraneoplastic syndrome, that awesome diagnosis that can be pretty much anything. House says he already figured all of this out anyway, and is only seeking Wilson's advice for non-medical things, which is good because Wilson is a terrible doctor anyway. House wants to know why Wilson isn't yelling at him for refusing to go to Cuddy's meeting. He's shocked when Wilson says it's because he agrees with what he's doing. House was so sure that he was doing the wrong thing, and happy about it. Wilson says that both Cuddy and Murphy only want House at the meeting as a middleman so they don't have to work out their own problems with each other. "You tripped and fell into an actual adult response to this," Wilson says. House is not pleased, realizing that he didn't trip and fall so much as was tricked into it by Cuddy, who never wanted him to attend that meeting in the first place.
Murphy Brown and her lawyer meet with Cuddy. Murphy Brown has to use a cane to walk now, thanks to her daughter's terrible hospital. Does Cuddy own stock in a cane company or something? Because House has to use a cane to walk after having her as his doctor, too. Apparently, everyone Cuddy treats ends up using a cane. Or missing a hand, like her handyman who fell off her roof in Season Two.
Cuddy says House doesn't need to be here, since she's sure Murphy's lawsuit is about their fight and not the treatment she received at PPTH. That treatment certainly doesn't seem to have made an impact on Murphy's appetite, though. I love you, Candice Bergen, but if you're going to appear on TV and weigh like 50 pounds more than you used to and be put to emaciated Lisa Edelstein, I have no choice but to comment on it. Cuddy says she wants to work things out with Murphy without lawyers present, seeing as how it is Mother's Day in a few days (Happy Mother's Day, Mom! I love you!). Murphy apparently agrees, and the lawyer leaves the room.
Cuddy says Murphy might be mad at her for suggesting she move in with her, but it's obvious that Murphy is struggling during her recovery and at Cuddy's house, she'll have Cuddy to take care of her and Murphy can spend time with her grand-daughter. "Win-win!" she says. That sounds like it's lose-lose to me. And to Murphy, who insists that this isn't personal but about the suffering she endured at the hands of PPTH and her "uncaring daughter." Okay, bitch. An uncaring daughter wouldn't offer to let you stay in her home. But maybe she learned not to care about family from the woman who is suing her own daughter's hospital that also saved her life.
"What do you want?" Cuddy sighs. Murphy demands $20,000, enough to hire someone to help her in her own home. And then she asks for another $10,000 to install one of those stair lifts, even though they only cost like $1,500 at the most and those commercials always say that most people are covered by their insurance. Cuddy tells her mother that if the hospital board hears about Murphy's possible lawsuit, they'll investigate Murphy's treatment and Cuddy and House will probably lose their licenses as a result. That's why Cuddy would rather believe that this lawsuit is due to personal reasons rather than her mother being ungrateful and kind of evil. And money-grubbing. Murphy has the grace to look ashamed, but before she can speak, House bursts in with a tray of medical supplies and offers to take out Murphy's shiny new hip and replace it with her deadly broken old one. He makes a crack about Cuddy's bedroom habits, at which point Murphy grabs for her cane and leaves, the lawsuit un-dropped.
Foreman and Taub do some kind of scan on Cyrus's internal organs. Foreman claims that he only rigged that blood pressure moni
tor because he had a lot of salt at breakfast, not because he was afraid Chase was right. Taub shrugs, and Foreman asks if he thinks he's repressed and angry, too. Maybe Taub just doesn't give a shit, like the rest of the viewing audience. Taub says that Foreman probably is really repressed, and he has no idea if Chase is telling the truth about not having sex anymore or not, but hopes for the best for him. Fortunately, that boring conversation soon comes to an end when Taub spots the tumor on Cyrus's pancreas... only to find another one in his kidney, and then a third in his colon. They're all different kinds of cancerous tumors, too, which means that the lucky lottery winner managed to get three totally different cancers at the same time.Wilson and House discuss House's disastrous interruption of the Cuddy meeting. House claims he was simply doing what Wilson showed him needed to be done, while Wilson correctly guesses that House just wanted to get back at Cuddy for almost successfully tricking him because he still clearly has feelings for her. House claims that he's happier without Cuddy, although his definition of happy is that he no longer expects her to make him happy and is "happier with [his] unhappiness." Wilson threatens to make House and Cuddy talk to each other and come up with an anti-Murphy Brown plan of action before she files the lawsuit and they both get fired.
House walks into the meeting room, where Taub tells him that their patient has triple cancer. Chase is too busy hooking Foreman up to another BP monitor to offer any diagnoses, so Hadley comes up with "multi-cancer syndrome." Um, is that even real? It sounds so cartoonishly awful that it can't be real, right?
Chase finishes hooking Foreman up as Hadley makes another suggestion: Cyrus is missing the gene that suppresses tumors. Foreman says that could be true, but they'd never be able to find it since they have to give him chemo, like, now. Chase says they can't even do that, since Cyrus's platelet counts are too low. And House doesn't want to do it because then Cyrus's cancers will go away before they find out what caused them. What House wants to do instead, then, is pump Cyrus full of tumor-growing chemicals. Foreman's BP jumps. "You want to grow more and bigger cancers?" he asks House, trying his best to keep his repressed rage from showing on the BP monitor. House says it's the only way to find out what's causing them all -- if they can't figure out what the three small, separate cancers have in common, then maybe they'll have more luck with eight big ones. Yeah, but... isn't one of the cancers in his pancreas? Isn't that almost always terminal? How would making it worse accomplish anything at this point except kill him sooner? Foreman's BP climbs steadily until he rips the cuff off, yelling that this BP thing is stupid since even if he is full of repressed rage, he can obviously control it. Hadley says it could lead to an early death for Foreman, who totally should have shot back a cutting remark about her terminal illness. That would have shut her up.
House sends everyone away to convince Cyrus to agree to let them make his three cancers worse to somehow make him better. He stops Hadley on her way out again and produces a picture of some guy. Hadley identifies him as her high school boyfriend and accuses House of stealing it out of her yearbook. House says he actually just took the picture, since High School Boyfriend is sitting outside. Sure enough, the guy is sitting on a bench, watching. How did Hadley not notice him before? Aren't all the walls made of transparent glass? House believes that being dumped by this guy was what made Hadley so bitter about the idea of long-lost loves reuniting successfully. "He dumped me after I hooked up with his sister," Hadley says, apparently meaning that a joyous reunion is out of the question. House is forced to concede defeat.
Here's how Taub explains the procedure to Cyrus: "we're giving you more cancer." For some reason, Phil and Jennifer don't think this sounds like a good plan. Hadley says they think this is their only shot to find out what genetic flaw is causing the cancer to form in the first place, and Taub shoves a consent form in Cyrus's face to sign. He doesn't. Instead, he turns to Jennifer and asks her to marry him. "Don't be stupid," Jennifer says. How romantic! Too bad Jennifer isn't Cameron, who would have jumped at the chance to marry the guy dying of cancer. In fact, I'm surprised she hasn't shown up yet already to offer her hand. Surely her lonely terminal cancer sufferer eligible bachelor alert has sounded by now. Jennifer says there's no way that Cyrus can know that he's in love with Jennifer yet; he needs more time, and she thinks he'll have it. With his eight cancers. Okay. Taub glances over at Hadley, happy to have proven to her that Jennifer isn't into Cyrus just for the money.
But Hadley isn't convinced. In the hall, she comments that Jennifer has been wearing a different outfit every day. "As opposed to the same Starfleet-issued tunic?" Taub asks. Can this actually happen? It's the only way I'll have any hope for Season 8. If they're all wearing Star Trek uniforms, the season might not completely suck. Hadley says Jennifer claimed she was just coming up here for the day, and yet, she has several outfits. Maybe she's like all those people on Gilligan's Island who packed like 20 outfits for a three-hour boat ride. Taub asks Hadley to explain why Jennifer turned down the proposal, and Hadley says she was playing it smart and slow; if she accepted so quickly, Cyrus would have been suspicious.
Later that night, House finds Foreman on the balcony in mid-yoga pose. "I need a hooker," Foreman says. "Not if you can make that work," House comments. Foreman says the yoga is for him, for relaxation. The hooker is for Chase, to prove that he's still sleeping with random women. House recommends that Foreman just accept that he's a "repressed idiot" and can't do anything to change that. That scene was kind of pointless, but it wasted three minutes.
House decides to spend his free time watching his tiny portable TV in a patient room. He's also in the patient's bed. The patient has been moved to the floor. He doesn't seem to mind due to being in a coma. Or dead. Anyway, this is the guy whose medical license Cuddy is trying so hard to keep. It makes no sense to me anymore. Cuddy and Wilson walk in, having tracked House down due to Wilson planting a tracking device on House's portable TV, as he knew House would try to hide from them instead of attend Wilson's summit meeting. Cuddy had no intention of skipping the meeting, as she has plenty to say to House. She says she had a right to dump him and he needs to get over it before they both lose their careers. Wilson tells them both to shut up so he can assign blame: Cuddy is at fault for trying to trick House when she "used to know better," while House is at fault for being himself. Wilson says the following will happen: he will drive them both to Murphy Brown's house in the morning, where Cuddy will give her a check from Cuddy's own bank account for $30,000 and House will sincerely apologize. If he doesn't, Wilson threatens, he will tell on House to the pharmacy, where House has been issuing himself Vicodin prescriptions with Wilson's name on them. Why doesn't he do that now? Does he want House to have easy access to Vicodin? And why is the pharmacy so easily fooled? This is the kind of hospital mismanagement that gets you sued by your own mother.
The day, Hadley checks on Cyrus and asks where Jennifer is. "She's embezzling money from my Swiss bank account," Cyrus says, having figured out that Hadley is suspicious of Jennifer's intentions. Hadley admits that she's pretty sure Jennifer wouldn't have come running if Cyrus hadn't won all that money. "You think you're protecting me. I think you're sad," Cyrus says; "can't stand to see somebody happy." That's probably true, but it doesn't mean that Jennifer isn't into Cyrus's money.
Cuddy, Wilson, and House arrive at Murphy Brown's ho
use. Cuddy hands her a check for $30,000 and says she was wrong to ask Murphy to move in with her. "I'm sorry," House says. He can't help but add: "that we saved your life." Cuddy and Wilson cringe. But House saves it: "in the way that we did." Wilson awards House a B+ for this and says he hopes that Murphy will be satisfied and drop her lawsuit. As soon as Wilson starts speaking, though, Murphy scowls and decides that the $30,000 isn't enough anymore. She needs money to pay for a lawyer to alter her will and disinherit Cuddy. Oh, please. Like she didn't leave everything to her favorite daughter ten years ago. Murphy says she has to do that to prevent Cuddy from being able to engage in any "funny business" to take over Murphy's home. Wilson is used to people stepping all over him and says he's sure Cuddy will be happy to throw Murphy an extra $2,500. He's standing behind Cuddy and so can't see the anger on her face. Cuddy, it seems, does not have a problem repressing her rage. "I'll have to kill you tonight, then," Cuddy says to her mother. And then they start fighting again. Wilson tries to calm Cuddy down, but House wants to lose his medical license, so he chimes in by saying that Murphy Brown is right to sue PPTH based on the horrible things Cuddy is saying to one of her former patients right now. Murphy rips up the check. I don't know why Cuddy even went along with Wilson's plan in the first place. Then again, I don't know why Cuddy offered up her house for Murphy to stay in, either. I can't think of a less pleasant houseguest.And in another plotline that I don't really care about or even understand due to the characters not really acting like human beings, Foreman and Taub watch as a pretty young PPTH employee flirts with Chase. Foreman says he paid her $100 to flirt with Chase and then slap him when he inevitably hits on her. What does that even prove? Didn't Chase say he stopped having sex so he'd be ready when the right woman came along? If he thinks the woman flirting with him right now is that right woman, then what would it prove if he hit on her or not? It doesn't really matter, since the employee eventually walks away from Chase looking disappointed. She then slaps Foreman violently and gives him his $100 back. She may want to hang onto that money, since she's totally fired now.
Taub does an ultrasound on Cyrus to find out how many new tumors he has. Meanwhile, Cyrus is talking to Jennifer about writing a will and putting her in it, and she's urging him to give that money to charities or family members instead. He may not have to give it to anyone just yet, though, as Taub says that, despite the tumor-growing drugs they gave him, he doesn't have any new tumors or cancers. Not only that, but the tumors he did have are also shrinking.
Back in the meeting room, Chase hooks Foreman up to the BP monitor again (WHY. I don't understand what this plotline is supposed to be or why it's even still happening) as he says that their missing tumor suppressing gene theory was obviously wrong. Foreman says Cyrus must have an autoimmune disorder and somehow created antibodies that fought his own tumors, which meant the tumor-growing drugs they gave him somehow made his autoimmune disorder better. Taub says Cyrus might not have cancer at all, and Foreman angrily says of course he does; the biopsies confirmed it and everything. His BP rises. "It could've been a false positive," he says, trying to be cheerful and stress-free. Hadley says if the biopsies were wrong, then Cyrus could have amyloidosis, and House says that sounds good enough to him and orders them to treat Cyrus for it. Foreman doesn't think they have enough proof to act on Hadley's theory yet, and his BP climbs. He accuses Chase of fixing the monitor somehow, and Hadley says she thought Foreman was the one who fixed BP monitors. "I KNOW IT'S RIGGED!" Foreman says. Taub says that Foreman's obvious rage issue shows that it's probably correct. "I TOOK A BETA BLOCKER!" Foreman reveals. So he cheated. So did Chase, who opens his fist to reveal a remote control and admits that he used it the last time, too. Thus, nothing has been proven and I care about even less than I did before.
Foreman says that giving Cyrus chemo for amyloidosis when his platelets are still low is insane and deadly. House says they don't have any other options unless Foreman thinks he can shout Cyrus's mystery illness away. He orders the chemo. They all leave except for Hadley, who is once again held back by House. She says there's no dirty little secret behind her negativity about Cyrus and Jennifer; she simply believes that we are who we are and that lotteries are stupid. Well, of course she does. She lost the Huntington's lottery.
House has been placed on punishment Clinic duty. "Janet Hemorrhoid!" he calls out to the waiting room loudly. Janet Hemorrhoid stands up and informs House that "Hemorrhoid" is not her last name, but her complaint. Which she obviously doesn't appreciate the entire waiting room knowing about. House says they'll have to work quickly, as he's about to lose his license for malpractice, as is the head of PPTH. Janet Hemorrhoid leaves. I guess time she won't go to a free clinic. You get what you pay for. Wilson approaches and exposits that Cuddy quadrupled House's clinic hours. Why? It's not his fault Murphy Brown is so horrible. He did go there and apologize. Cuddy was the one who threatened to kill her mother. House says it's not too bad, as for some reason, he's zipping through his Clinic cases today. Wilson says Murphy Brown asked for another meeting with Cuddy and House. House refuses to attend, as, Wilson says, did Cuddy. Wilson has also decided that House is trying to ruin everyone's efforts to drop Murphy's lawsuit because he doesn't want to lose another connection to Cuddy. House says that makes no sense, since he obviously didn't put Murphy up to suing her own daughter and the hospital. Wilson insists that House still loves Cuddy, but he's sabotaging any chance at reconciliation by doing this. I think he might have sabotaged any chance at reconciliation when he married that other woman.
Cyrus hands Phil an envelope. Inside, he says, is a check for $10 million. Phil's eyes bug out. Hadley and Taub's do, too. Phil says Cyrus has already been more than generous with him, but Cyrus says that hiring Phil and paying him really well wasn't enough for his family member and his best friend over the years. Phil takes the check. Jennifer is so moved that she starts to cry. Hadley hands her a tissue, and notices that Jennifer is wearing contacts under her glasses. That's a little strange. Jennifer says she forgot to take them off. And didn't realize they were still in when she put her glasses on? I doubt it. Also, Hadley's ridiculously keen eyesight notes that the lenses are tinted brown. "Sometimes I like to mix it up," Jennifer shrugs. That gets Cyrus's attention. The Jennifer Williams he knew 23 years ago had brown eyes. This Jennifer Williams just wants people to think she has brown eyes. He asks her where his nickname for her, "Baby Bear," came from. She doesn't remember. Cyrus angrily says it's the name of a birthmark on her left breast that's shaped like a bear. Either Jennifer forgot about that, which is highly unlikely, or she never knew it in the first place. Because Phil never knew about it. It's the only thing about Jennifer that Cyrus never told Phil. He realizes that Phil, his cousin and best friend, apparently paid a woman to pretend to be Jennifer and convince Cyrus to give his cousin a shit-ton of money. That sucks, but it's still better than what I thought Phil was doing, which was poisoning Cyrus so he'd get all his money in the will. Cyrus screams at Phil and Jennifake to leave his room. Phil better run his ass off to an ATM and deposit that check quick before Cyrus cancels it. Cyrus is so upset that, as he tells Hadley she was right and that his life will always suck despite all the money he won, all of his organs fail.
Since the meeting room has been such a failure today, House and the Cottages meet up in the hallway to discuss Cyrus's case. He clearly doesn't have amyloidosis, so good thing his organs started to fail before they could hook him up to the unnecessary deadly chemo. Taub would rather discuss Cyrus's love life, saying that after a lifetime of crappiness and three cancers, it took one woman to actually make Cyrus miserable. "The truth made him miserable," Hadley says. WHO CARES? Also, I don't know if it was the fake Jennifer that upset Cyrus so much as it was the fact that his best friend and cousin put her up to it to try to get some money out of him. Before they can discuss it any further, though, the fire alarm goes off.
Outside, Cuddy meets with her PPTH people and gives them orders on how to proceed. Fires in hospitals are tricky business, since most of the patients are in the hospital because they're sick or injured, making it hard to move them all outside. Also, there are a lot of them. And they're usually hooked up to machines and stuff that can't just be plugged in the outside wall outlet. Oh, and some of the stuff they are hooked up to is oxygen, which you do not want to expose to the fire. Cuddy says that as long as the fire is contained in the administrative section, they won't have to evacuate any of the patients. Just as Cuddy walks past House, Murphy Brown suddenly appears, grinning sheepishly. Yes, it was Cuddy's mother who pulled the fire alarm, "explaining" that it was the only way to get House and Cuddy to meet with her again. So all someone has to do is pull a fire alarm to get all of PPTH to fly out of the hospital like that? There are patients just sitting in wheelchairs on the front lawn, for God's sake! There are doctors milling around in the driveway instead of treating their patients who may urgently need them! Like poor Cyrus, who is dying very quickly and his doctors can't think of a diagnosis because they're all standing around to the firetrucks. PPTH is the worst hospital in the world.
So what was so important that Murphy Brown had to put several patient lives in danger? She says she's filing her lawsuit today. Great. PPTH can go and file one right back at her for deliberately pulling a fire alarm when there was no fire. I'm pretty sure that's a criminal offense, too. Especially if one of the patients were to die because of it. Cuddy is, of course, furious, and she and Murphy exchange insults about what failures they are as people until House cuts in and tells Murphy that he and Cuddy aren't getting back together. While Cuddy was too busy feeling hurt, betrayed, and furious with her mother for all of this, House realized that this was her way of trying to get Cuddy and House back together: by uniting them against a common enemy. Cuddy doesn't think that's what it is at all until she sees her mother's face. "Who else is gonna put up with either of you?" she asks. When Cuddy asked Murphy to move in, Murphy realized that there was no way Cuddy and House would get back together unless she "helped." And putting her own daughter through all of this pain and torture was the only way she could think of to do it? That's insane. "Some things take more than a common enemy," Cuddy says, hugging her mother. I wouldn't hug my mom after a stunt like that. I don't care how well-intentioned it was. "You're an idiot with impossible standards," Murphy says. Cuddy looks back for House, but he's gone.
You see, all this "common enemy" talk gave him an off-camera Epiphany Face. He heads for Cyrus's room and he figured out that there's a common enemy in Cyrus's body that caused all of his problems: a teratoma. What is a teratoma? House describes it as a "congenital growth which can be filled with almost any kind of tissue." I call it "one of those horrible tumors with hair and teeth. Yes, HAIR AND TEETH! THERE COULD BE A TUMOR IN YOUR BODY RIGHT NOW GROWING HAIR AND TEETH! SOMETIMES THEY CAN GROW LITTLE ARMS AAAHHHHHH THE HUMAN BODY IS A NIGHTMARE!" Anyway, Cyrus's teratoma was not full of hair or teeth or little arms, but with cells that differentiated into brain cells. Those cells somehow left the teratoma and entered Cyrus's blood stream, where his immune system saw them as a foreign object and created antibodies to fight them. Unfortunately, those antibodies started fighting the brain cells in Cyrus's brain, too. And then, somehow, some of the undifferentiated cells in Cyrus's teratoma also leaked out and started turning into all kinds of random specialized cells, causing his organs to fail. And also created those tumors and made them grow rapidly and were full of cancer too, somehow. Um, I'm not really sure how that all worked out in the end. I watched this several times and I still couldn't figure it out. I have a feeling the writers couldn't, either. Also, even though you'd think the teratoma damage was already done now that the cells have leaked out and created havoc all over Cyrus's body, House says that all they have to do is cut out the teratoma and his cancer tumors and he'll be just fine. That's not good enough for Cyrus, of course, who is still too upset about Jennifer to be happy about living.
That night, a blonde woman rolls over in bed to Chase, who clearly isn't as chaste as he claimed to be, not like anyone cares. Also, is that blonde woman the same woman who claimed to be Jennifer? Or is that the PPTH nurse Foreman paid off? Or someone else entirely? I honestly can't tell. White people all look alike. Foreman monitors his own blood pressure in a dark room. Fun. A third Jennifer Williams shows up in Cyrus's room. This time, it's the real one. Hadley watches them from the nurse's station as House walks up and offers her a potato chip. She says this Jennifer Williams has the correct birthmark and Cyrus is renting her an apartment. House predicts that this will end horribly. Hadley says it probably will, but even if Jennifer Williams takes Cyrus for a ride and he ends up with nothing, she thinks he'll always be hopeful and therefore, always be happy. House decides that Hadley is trying to convince herself that she was meant to be miserable even before almost everyone in her family got Huntington's because she can't deal with
hating the universe for making her life so horrible. "Fatalism is your survival mechanism," he says. Hadley asks what House's excuse is, then, since his life sucks, too. Yeah, but not nearly as much as hers does. "We are who we are. Lotteries are stupid," she repeats. Totally. That's why if you want money, you should just sue your daughter's hospital for it. Or let a co-worker pay you $100 to flirt with another co-worker. Those things aren't stupid at all.You can read more from Sara Morrison at L.A.me, follow her on Twitter, or you can email her at saramorrison@gmail.com.
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