No one except Foreman gets any sleep this episode, which takes place over the course of one night of terrible ideas from our cast of characters. First off, Taub finds out that Ruby, the nurse's aide he's been dating, is pregnant. She wants to have the baby. He doesn't. Foreman tries to console him with a trip to a strip club, but that goes poorly when Taub notices an asymmetrical mole on his stripper and keeps trying to touch it, getting him kicked out of the club. He insists on sticking around until closing time to try to talk to the stripper about her mole again, but she is freaked out to see him waiting for her and pulls a gun on him. She ends up driving away without shooting Taub, who realizes when his life flashes before his eyes that it would be nice to leave a kid behind in this world after all and tells Ruby he wants her to keep the baby too.
Meanwhile, Hadley gets a visit from a prison friend who was stabbed while running away from the cops. She needs medical attention, but doesn't want to go to a hospital for fear that she'll be arrested. She asks Hadley to tend to her wound instead, but when she loses a pulse and blood pressure in one of her arms, Hadley needs Chase to come over with a portable ultrasound to figure out what's wrong. When the friend, Darrien, starts to hallucinate, Chase insists that Hadley has to break her promise to Darrien and take her to a hospital. Hadley still refuses, but Chase is much stronger than she is. He's also right -- it turns out that Darrien had parasites in her liver that were released into her bloodstream when she was stabbed, thus causing all the complications. Darrien's life is saved, but her trip to the hospital is going to be followed by a trip to jail. She is not happy with Hadley for this, but Hadley knows she did the right thing. And she and Chase find out that the other one killed someone for what they thought were the right reasons, even if it did make them both feel really bad about it.
Finally, there's House. He finds out that all the rats in the muscle-re-growing drug trial died after getting a bunch of tumors, which means the drug is not a success after all and it's a good thing it was never given to any humans. Oops! It was given to one human: House, who runs off to scan his leg for any new growths and is not pleased to find three tumor-looking things in his leg. They need to be removed, so he decides to go ahead and do it himself. In his bathtub. Yeah. He manages to remove one of the tumors, but then he's in too much pain and his system is too traumatized for him to be able to continue. He calls Wilson and the Cottages for help, but they're otherwise occupied, leaving one person left in his phonebook: Cuddy. She dutifully comes to his apartment with Rachel in tow and brings him to the hospital so a surgeon can properly finish what House started. He asks/begs her to be in the operating room with them to make sure they don't chop away any more of his muscle than necessary and especially not his entire leg, saying he trusts her more than any surgeon. She agrees, and House wakes up from the surgery with his leg intact and a lecture from Wilson waiting for him, as well as a note from Rachel, who misses his terrible paternal influence.
A desperate, bleeding woman breaks into a car and hotwires it to life. She speeds through traffic, but has a hard time driving safely due to being on the verge of passing out from blood loss. Finally, she drives into some newspaper boxes on the Fox city street backlot set, gets out of the car, and staggers into an apartment building that apparently doesn't lock its front door. She knocks on the door of Apartment 3, and Hadley answers. Oh, good. I was hoping for another Hadley-centric episode. They're so rare these days!
But Hadley's friend, Darrien, is not at PPTH when the credits end like your typical Patient of the Week, but still in Hadley's apartment. She doesn't want to go to the hospital because the police will find her there and send her back to the jail where she and Hadley met for hanging out with convicted felons. Wait -- shouldn't Hadley also not be allowed near convicted felons? Like... Darrien? Whatever. Hadley doesn't seem too worried about it. Darrien thinks Hadley can just fix her up, but Hadley says it's much more complicated than that, and if Darrien were to die in Hadley's apartment, Hadley would be charged with manslaughter. That would be kind of funny, though, if Hadley managed to be charged with manslaughter of a friend just a few months after getting out of jail for killing her own brother. Darrien would rather leave Hadley's apartment and die in an alley than go to the hospital, leaving Hadley with no choice but to agree to help her in her own home. She promises Darrien that she won't take her to the hospital.
House is relaxing at home, and he has company: one of his prostitutes, who is considerate enough of her client to refuse to agree to a Kama Sutra position he's proposing because she knows House's bad leg won't be able to do it. House says she doesn't need to worry about that, as he is taking an "experimental medicine" that regrew his leg muscle. He tries to prove his newfound strength to her by lifting up some huge, heavy guitar amps. He's successful in his efforts for a few seconds before one of the amps topples over and falls through his glass coffee table. His special rat medicine was also on that table, just sitting out in the open in a little dish, and so spills all over the floor. House will have to get more, which he'd rather go out and do than spend time with the prostitute. I guess the unsuccessful guitar-amp-lifting killed the mood.
Hadley digs a few fingers into Darrien's wound to feel her internal organs and make sure they weren't hit by the knife that pierced Darrien's right side. Hadley reports that everything is fine except for Darrien's liver, which was nicked but seems to have clotted over. Then, as the camera waves around the scene annoyingly (seriously, it was in rare form this week. I thought this show had finally gotten over the way-too-artsy, distracting direction), Hadley checks Darrien for internal bleeding. She doesn't find any signs of it... yet.
And over at Foreman's apartment, Foreman comes home from the gym to find Taub and the woman he sleeps with when he isn't with his ex-wife, Ruby, in the middle of a seemingly serious conversation. Ruby jumps up and leaves to go to work. Foreman asks Taub if they just broke up or something. Taub says it's much worse than that: Ruby is pregnant. Oops!
Darrien tells Hadley and us how she wound up getting stabbed. The police raided her boyfriend/dealer/pimp/whatever's place, so he stabbed her "to slow the cops down." That doesn't even make sense. Also, way to get an attempted murder charge and several years tacked onto your sentence for no reason when the cops do catch you, boyfriend/dealer/pimp/whatever. Of course, Darrien says, the ploy didn't even work. The cops just called an ambulance for Darrien and kept chasing after the guy, leaving her lying there unattended. So she got up, stole that car, and parked it basically on the doorstep of Hadley's apartment building. Yeah, I'm sure the cops won't figure out where she's hiding. Very clever, Darrien. Hadley interrupts Darrien's boring life story to inform her that she has no blood pressure and almost no pulse in her left arm. Since Darrien is clearly not dead, that doesn't make sense. Hadley puts the cuff around Darrien's other arm, which does register a blood pressure. This means that something must be cutting off the blood supply to Darrien's left arm, and she could really use a hospital about now. Instead, Hadley calls Chase, of all people. He's lying in bed reading a book about the Crusades, but when she asks if he's busy, he claims he's "about to go out." Hadley asks if he can pick up a portable ultrasound machine from PPTH and drop it off at her place on his way. She claims she needs it to figure out why the pipe in her bathroom is leaking.
House finds the Clinical Research Lab open and the underpaid dork who is apparently the only guy who works there in despite the seemingly late hour. Underpaid Dork is packing everything up, which House believes is because the drug trial, no doubt a huge success, is over. Underpaid Dork says the trial ended because all of the test subjects died after developing little rat tumors in their little rat legs. House is clearly ad understandably alarmed at the news. He asks if the rats showed any symptoms that something was wrong. Underpaid Dork says their legs seemed a little stiff and they had trouble picking up little rat guitar amps. A day or two later, they were dead. How exactly do little tumors kill that quickly? Is it because they were cancerous? Doesn't cancer take more than a few days to kill someone? Weird.
Chase shows up at Hadley's place with the portable ultrasound. Hadley grabs it and tries to close the door in his face, but he puts a hand out to stop it, noting that her socks are dry. So she probably isn't dealing with a leak in her bathroom after all. Good detective work, Chase, although I have a feeling that he never believed her story in the first place due to it being pretty ridiculous. He says if she needs the ultrasound for something medical, then he can help. "I am a doctor," he says. Thank you for the exposition, Chase, but I think we all knew that already. Hadley decides to let Chase in, and he sees Darrien on the couch. Hadley explains that Darrien is her friend and that she met her in prison, which is where she was last year, by the way. Surely Chase is now regretting insisting on helping out.
House manages to give himself a PET scan without anyone in PPTH knowing. The results are bad news for him: just like the rats, he has a bunch of tumors in his leg. That sucks for him, but I don't really feel sorry for the guy. He should have known better than to inject himself with something that wasn't even finished being tested on lab rats. Also, this makes him the second character on this show to get tumors from an experimental medicine: remember Hadley and her Huntington's trial brain tumor? I guess the writers were hoping we would forget.
Hadley ultrasounds Darrien while Chase paces her apartment, shocked to have just heard the details on how Hadley ended up in jail. He thinks she should talk to a professional about her issues, but she'd rather concentrate on Darrien and the aortic arch aneurysm she believes is cutting off the blood supply to Darrien's left arm. "Help me or leave," Hadley barks. Chase decides to help, and makes a move towards Darrien. Hadley tells him to put gloves on first, since Darrien has hepatitis C. I'm sorry, but shouldn't Chase be putting gloves on, like, no matter what for this kind of thing? Shouldn't doctors always approach patients with gloves on? For both the doctor's and the patient's sakes? These people are so bad at being doctors.
While Chase is struggling to put the gloves on (he's not used to them, so it might take a while), Hadley says Darrien was her friend in prison and probably saved her life by taking her under her wing. Unfortunately for Darrien, that wing is now starting to turn blue and go numb from the lack of blood. There is no aneurysm, but Hadley is able to see something in Darrien's arm on the u
ltrasound that must be responsible for cutting off the blood supply. It doesn't look like a clot, so Chase and Hadley guess it's a lipoma that swelled up to its current, blood-supply-cutting-off size when blood loss from the stab wound gave it more room to expand. I love how Darrien lost so much blood that she was in danger of dying from it a few minutes ago and her veins apparently were so emptied out that lipomas are expanding into them, but Hadley hasn't so much as set her up with a saline IV for it. Maybe Darrien's body managed to make pints of new blood faster than any other human has ever and so she doesn't need the saline or a transfusion. But I doubt it. Hadley and Chase try to reduce the size of lipoma by draining it, but the fluid they collect in syringes is not the expected fat, but blood. Which means that isn't a lipoma after all. Also, way to deprive Darrien of even more blood there, guys.Meanwhile, Foreman and Taub are at a strip club. A very tame strip club, due to this show being on broadcast TV at 8 pm. Taub drinks and rants about how he doesn't want Ruby to have his baby and she shouldn't want to have his baby, either, since he's "short" and "balding." Thank you, writers who hate Peter Jacobson. Foreman agrees with Taub that Ruby should not have Taub's baby, saying he'd be a terrible father because he's a horrible, selfish person. Foreman also thinks that Taub is actually considering telling Ruby to keep the baby, otherwise he wouldn't be ignoring the strippers in a strip club. Maybe he's ignoring them because they're wearing more clothing than a JC Penney lingerie sale ad? Suddenly, Taub is whisked away for a private lap dance.
Hadley has finally managed to drain enough blood from the mystery blob to return blood flow to Darrien's arm. Chase thinks they have to figure out what caused the mystery lump to form in the first place or else risk it coming back and killing Darrien. Hadley says it must be related to the stabbing, and suggests that if Darrien's body used all of its clotting factors to repair the damage to her liver, that would somehow cause a bloody mass to grow in her arm. That means another bloody mass could grow anywhere in her body at anytime -- and the one could be in a spot that would kill her. Chase says they have to get Darrien to a hospital. Darrien refuses, and reminds Hadley that she promised she wouldn't take her to one. Hadley thinks they can just pick up a bag of clotting factor at PPTH, bring it back to Hadley's apartment, and give it to Darrien. She'll be fine and never need to go to the hospital. Chase doesn't understand why Hadley is going through all of this, and Hadley, with the camera way too close to her face, claims it's because she cares about Darrien.
It's true, you guys: hospitals are freaking useless. You can do everything you do in a hospital in your own home. Why, just look at House, who turned his bathroom into an OR with some floor cleaner, Vicodin, surgical tools, and plenty of syringes full of what I'm hoping for his sake is local anesthesia. He sets up his bathtub/operating table with the leg tumor scan (his doctor is listed as Hourani on it, by the way. Poor guy will never be free of having his reputation ruined by House, apparently), some medical textbooks (simply to keep his leg in position, not to read, as House doesn't need them), reading lamps, a large magnifying glass, and gets to work numbing the shit out of his leg. And then he goes ahead and cuts into it. Yes, the supposedly brilliant doctor thinks that he can safely operate on himself in his freaking bathtub.
While Chase is off fetching the clotting factor, Hadley helps Darrien into her bed (I hope she uses hepatitis C-killing bleach on her sheets after Darrien is done there. Or burns them) and asks her why she got back on drugs after getting out of jail. Darrien obviously doesn't want to talk about it, but Hadley presses, saying she has to "deal with the real problem" behind her drug use. Okay, Hadley. Meanwhile, anytime anyone asks Hadley a personal question she gives even less away than Darrien. Hypocrite! Darrien basically tells Hadley to fuck off.
House is still being an idiot and doing surgery on himself. Honestly, I don't even know what to say about this. It's so ridiculous and so far-fetched. I mean, the reason why he even has these tumors in the first place is pretty much beyond the realm of believability, even for this show, and then for this to be the way he goes about getting rid of them... not only is it inconsistent with his character in a lot of ways, but it's also inconsistent with every character, like, ever. The only people who perform surgery on themselves are that woman who got breast cancer in Antarctica and those really crazy guys who cut off their own penises you see in the news sometimes. And yet, here House is, sitting in his bathtub, deep into his own leg, slightly sweaty but still working away and fishing around in there for the tumors. Great. He finds one and slowly, painfully, and shakily removes it. He goes back in for the second one, but his hand is now shaking too much from either the pain or the trauma to his body or both, and the local anesthetic isn't very effective the deeper into his own tissue he gets. Plus, he just used his last shot. So he's screwed. How did he not know this was going to happen? Come on.
Wilson is asleep in bed. Unfortunately for House, Wilson put his phone on vibrate for reasons I can't fathom and doesn't answer when he calls. Taub's phone is also on vibrate, and while he is awake to answer it, he decides not to because he's in the middle of a lap dance. Instead, he tries to have a conversation with the stripper, asking if she has kids. Weirdo. "What would you do if you got pregnant?" he asks her. She rolls her eyes. He keeps going, asking how she would like the man who got her pregnant to tell her that he didn't think she should keep it. Yeah, she's not going to answer that question. But she does want a tip at the end of this, so she keeps trying to dance for him. Maybe if she actually took her clothes off, her patrons' minds wouldn't keep wandering? Taub notices a mole on the small patch of the stripper's body that isn't covered and asks her if she knows she has an asymmetrical mole. He feels the need to touch it as he points it out to her, which is, of course, not allowed. She slaps his hand away. Taub apologizes, then tells her to see a dermatologist, touching the mole again. The stripper calls for the bouncer. Taub's lap dance is suddenly over.
Hadley's phone buzzes, but the only person close enough to hear it is Darrien, and she's too concerned about the guy who just appeared at the foot of the bed to care. She begs him not to, but he slowly pulls a gun out of his sweatshirt and aims it at her. "Put it down on the ground and get away!" she yells. Hadley hears her from the living room and runs in to find out what's going on, but before she can get there, the guy with the gun has been shot between the eyes and Darrien is sobbing out apologies to him. Which is kind of weird for Hadley to see, since there's no one there. The guy was just a hallucination.
House is not looking good as he suffers away in the bathtub. He gives up for good on the surgery and takes off the gloves before dialing another phone number. Cuddy is sleeping at 11:46 pm, but the buzzing phone (none of these people keep their ringers on at night? And they're supposed to be doctors?) wakes her up. She finds Rachel hanging out in her room watching a weird pirate cartoon on TV and asks her what she's watching. "TV, you bloody scallywag!" Rachel says. Ha! That kid is already sassy. She is going to be a monster when she's a teenager. Cuddy turns the TV off and answers her phone, clearly annoyed to see House's number calling her. "Someone better be dying," she says instead of hello.
Chase returns with the clotting factor and Hadley tells him that Darrien is now hallucinating, so she'll need a second dose of the clotting factor to make sure the bleed that's probably in her brain won't kill her. Chase says that's not going to be nearly enough at this point. Brain bleeds are serious business, and Darrien will need to go to the hospital and have surgery if she wants any chance of surviving at this point. "We can drill a burr hole here," Hadley says. Oh my god, these people are all insane and stupid. I'm surprised Taub didn't try to do a biopsy on that stripper's mole right then and there, based on the way his boss and co-workers are all behaving.
Chase says Hadley is risking both of their careers, going back to jail, and Darrien's life by not taking her to the hospital, but Hadley insists on keeping her promise to Darrien. Chase says if Hadley won't take Darrien to the hospital, he will. Hadley says no and moves to block her bedroom door. Chase says he will physically remove Hadley if he has to. He's going to have to, since Hadley isn't going anywhere. He pushes her out of the way and thinks that's the end of it, but Hadley starts punching him. After she lands a good punch on his face, he realizes that he has no choice but to fight back, so he grabs her arm before she can hit him again, grabs her by the throat, and tosses her on the floor. Violence against women (and men) is wrong, of course, but I think we can all agree that Chase was not wrong here. Also, Hadley totally started it. Chase looks pretty horrified by the whole thing, but recovers and goes to the bedroom. Yeah, Hadley? I know you think you're a bad ass and everything, but you are not stronger than a man. Even Taub could probably kick your ass.
House is still in the bathtub. Cuddy arrives and takes in the scene: blood everywhere, House looking nearly dead and shivering with his leg sliced open and an excised tumor hanging out in a dish nearby. But Cuddy isn't alone! Yes, she brought her fucking 3 year old along. I'm sorry, but no. You do not bring your tiny young daughter to House's apartment when he is lying in a bathtub full of his own blood. If you can't find a baby-sitter at midnight, then you call an ambulance for House and let them help him or you put Rachel in the car and drive to Wilson's house to tell him what's going on and have him go help House. Cuddy tells Rachel to sit on the couch in the living room, so I sure hope House cleaned up all those glass shards that were on the floor earlier. And that he doesn't have random Vicodin pills lying around where a small child could find and eat them. Seriously, House's apartment is probably a death trap for an unattended tiny child. Hell, House himself has almost died there several times over the years.
Once Rachel is gone, House assures Cuddy that she was the last person on his list of people to call if he found himself in the middle of self-surgery and unable to continue. Cuddy asks him why he didn't just call 911. Um, why didn't you, Cuddy? "It's not an emergency," House says. He explains that he was just trying to remove a few "small" tumors that were close to the surface of his skin. "I thought it'd be like removing a wart," he says. Okay, so I guess he is an idiot, then. He's certainly not the genius doctor we're supposed to think he is if he thinks removing three tumors is that simple and easy. Cuddy asks why House didn't just give his scans to a real surgeon in the morning. House says surgeons are "idiots" who would "just hack away the muscle." Unlike House, who is so smart that he delicately and carefully operated on his own leg muscle while his hand was shaking uncontrollably due to shock and pain. Oh, and did it in the very sterile environment of his bathroom. Cuddy says House just didn't want to get in trouble for the reason he got those tumors in the first place. House ignores her and starts instructing her on how to find and remove the other two tumors. Cuddy has no intention of doing so. She'll be taking House to the hospital.
Chase speeds dangerously through the New Jersey streets. Hadley and Darrien are in the backseat, and Darrien is upset that she's being taken to a hospital and probably jail. Chase says he'll go in and find a patient on life support, then use her name on all of Darrien's tests. That way, he says, Darrien won't get caught. And Chase and Hadley won't get caught either? Because I'm pretty sure that's against the rules.
Oh, good. Rachel is in the front seat of Cuddy's car, looking back at House and his horrific leg wound. She asks House what happened to him, and he says he was trying to make his leg "better." Great, now Rachel thinks that cutting one's leg open is a way to make it "better." Cuddy says House was being "reckless," as if a three-year-old knows what that even means. She's totally cutting her leg open when she gets home. I'm sure Cuddy, terrible parent that she is, has made no effort to hide the knives from her child either, so she should have no problem finding proper cutting tools. Cuddy starts in with the lecture, saying that House was trying to make his life better by making his leg better, which we already heard from Wilson last week. "I've had a lot of setbacks lately," House says passive-aggressively. Cuddy won't let him blame her dumping him for his current state. "You're not unhappy because of me. You're just unhappy," she says.
Darrien is on the verge of passing out, so Hadley tries to keep her awake and alert by asking her what she hallucinated in Hadley's bedroom. Chase comments that the words Darrien used when yelling at the hallucination sounded like something a cop would say. Darrien can't help but admit that he's correct. You see, Darrien used to be a police officer. Hadley's all annoyed that Darrien didn't tell her about her past life when Hadley apparently told her everything about her own life. HA! See how it feels when people are all annoying and secretive, Hadley! At least Darrien had a reason not to tell anyone about her past, since, as she says, the last thing you want people to know about you in jail is that you used to be a police officer. As for the hallucination she apologized to over and over again? It was a 19-year-old who pulled a gun on her, so she had to shoot him. And her department apparently has terrible mental health services for this kind of thing, so she never got over the guilt and that's why she became the drug addict she is today. With that, she passes out.
Chase puts his foot on the gas. I totally thought they were going to get in a huge car accident with Cuddy, Rachel, and House's car, but no. The Cuddymobile is stopped at a red light and it's going to stay there until the light turns green, even though House thinks Cuddy should just run it. "The light is red, you bloody scallywag!" Rachel says. Cuddy orders her to stop with the pirate talk, prompting House to start with more pirate talk, delighting Rachel. Cuddy figures out who introduced Rachel to the pirate cartoon in the first place. "What kind of idiot lets a three-year-old watch that?" Cuddy snaps. Yeah, because that's so much worse than exposing her to a half-dead guy bleeding all over the backseat of the car or being the idiot who left her daughter with that kind of idiot in the first place. "If you want to lecture me on my poor judgment, there would seem to be more relevant examples," House mutters, admitting, for the first time, that this was a terrible, terrible idea.
Foreman finds Taub lingering in the parking lot of Bump N' Grind, the most unoriginally named strip club in New Jersey. Taub tells Foreman about how and why he got kicked out of the club. Foreman laughs at him and says they should go home. But Taub wants to stick around until closing time so he can talk to the stripper about her mole. This is a terrible idea, what with that bouncer ready and willing to beat the crap out of Taub for appearing to stalk one of the strippers, but Foreman thinks Taub actually wants to get beaten up as a way of punishing himself for getting Ruby pregnant. Foreman tells Taub the best thing he can do is go home and get some sleep to figure this all out, but Taub insists on staying. Foreman takes a cab home, thus making him the only smart and sane person in this entire episode. Well, Wilson too, I guess, but I don't know if one shot of him sleeping while his phone vibrates should count as being in the episode.
Hadley and Chase scan Darrien's brain. Chase wants to know why Hadley is risking so much for Darrien. Hadley says she made a promise, and promises are really important to her. Chase figures out that's because Hadley promised her brother she would kill him, thus allowing her to blame the promise she made for his death and not herself. Which means she has to keep every promise she makes, or else she'll feel really bad about killing her brother or whatever. Hadley just says that she did the best thing for her brother and that Darrien doesn't have a bleed in her brain. She does, however, have a fever.
Cuddy, Rachel, and House hang out in the ER. I'm assuming they're in PPTH, but I kind of expected better from its ER. House's heart rate says he's going into shock and he has a huge open gash in his tumor-filled leg, and yet, they're making him lie on a gurney in the hallway. Maybe they had a rush of people who also tried to do surgery on themselves? Cuddy fusses over House while he talks to Rachel about pirate cartoons. They have very different opinions about one episode; Rachel thought it was "so funny," while House found it to be "so lame." Cuddy grabs Rachel and runs off to find a nurse for House before he dies, leaving House to answer his ringing cell phone. It's Chase and Hadley, who need help diagnosing Darrien. House is a little annoyed with them for not taking his call when he needed them, but I guess he's bored, too, so he o
ffers his assistance.Taub waits for the stripper in his car. He asks his car to call Ruby. His car, actually sounding annoyed with him, asks if he wants to call her cell phone. He decides not to call her at all. His car is like "whatever, asshole."
Hadley tells House that Darrien was taking interferon while she was in prison, which Hadley guesses was for an advanced case of hepatitis C. They can't really ask Darrien to confirm that, though, as she is now in a coma. Oops! House notices that his leg is starting to bleed through the towel Cuddy wrapped around it. He takes a few more Vicodins and asks Hadley about Darrien's life pre-jail. Hadley now knows that Darrien was a cop who shot someone in self-defense. House says that all Hadley needs to do is find out when exactly that happened to figure out how long Darrien has been doing drugs, which should then give her a decent estimate on how long she's had hepatitis C. Chase doesn't think that's going to be very important to the case, but House points out that they don't have anything else to go on before hanging up on them as Cuddy arrives with a nurse.
Taub asks his car to call Rachel. I'm assuming he means his ex-wife, but he may very well mean Cuddy's daughter. Why not? It's not like she hasn't been exposed to everything else tonight. His car is like, "are you serious? You're going to tell your ex-wife that you got another woman pregnant? Why would you even do that. You're so awful." Taub cancels the call when he sees his stripper heading to the parking lot. He gets out of the car, which makes a comment that this looks like another one of its driver's awesome ideas, and runs towards her. Shockingly, she is not happy to see him there. In fact, she's pretty freaked out. She doesn't care that he claims to truly be a doctor. She doesn't care about her mole. She whips a gun out of her pocketbook and aims at him. Well, I can't say I'm surprised. Or that I really care. Go ahead and shoot Taub, stripper! I'm pretty much over him on this show. Then swing by PPTH and shoot Hadley and Cuddy! I'd put House on that list, too, but I guess you really can't have this show without him. And shoot Foreman and Wilson for being useless for like three seasons now. Chase can stay, but only if he stops sleeping with lots of women and being such a scumbag.
Stripper orders Taub to turn around and get down on his knees. Taub thinks he's going to die now as the stripper starts yelling at him for thinking he's special and can do whatever he wants to her, just like someone else did to her in the past. While Taub silently begs for his life and possibly wets his pants, she jumps in her car and takes off.
Hadley is having a hard time finding news articles on Darrien's shooting. Chase notices a bruise on her neck and feels bad since he put it there. Hadley says he had to do what he did, and he was right to do it. And, apparently, right about everything else. Hadley finally finds the article. Darrien had a different last name at the time, as she was apparently married when she shot that guy. Wow, so not only did the job that she was doing when she shot that guy turn its back on her, but a husband did, also? That sucks. Hadley is surprised at how recent the incident was -- only three years ago. That means there's no way Darrien had hepatitis C for long enough for it to become as chronic as it would need to be for her to be taking interferon. Which means whatever she has now, it can make a new case of hepatitis C look like an old case in lab work. Hadley says a parasite could do that -- the hepatitis somehow made Darrien more susceptible to the parasite, which then sped up the liver damage and made it look like she'd had hepatitis for a longer time than she actually did. Chase says if Darrien had an Entamoeba infection in her liver, then the stab wound would have released the parasites into her blood stream, causing all of her complications. They just have to give her some parasite-killing medicine and she should be on the road to recovery in a few hours.
Cuddy sits with House as he's prepared for surgery. The nurse says they're ready to operate, so Cuddy gets up to leave. But House asks her to stay and watch. "Make sure that idiot butcher doesn't cut more than he needs to," House says. Um, wasn't Cuddy the doctor in charge when House's leg lost that muscle in the first place? Why on earth would he trust her now? Although I guess if I had made a habit out of pissing off as many surgeons as House has, I'd want someone looking over their shoulder while I was unconscious, too. "I don't trust him. I trust you," he says/begs. And Cuddy, naturally, gives in.
Hadley is at Darrien's bedside when she wakes up, feeling and looking much better. Hadley tells her that she was suffering from a parasite infection, but she'll be fine now. Except for the fact that she's handcuffed to the bed and there's a cop watching from the hallway. Hadley says they had to give her real name to save her. Darrien doesn't care about that; she's mad at Hadley and says she never should have trusted her. Oh, and she says she never liked Hadley and only hung out with her because they were kind of stuck in prison together and Hadley was just a "distraction" for her. Yeah, I'm sure Hadley's feelings are so hurt that you don't want to be her friend anymore, Darrien. Who wouldn't miss the company of a woman who shows up unannounced bleeding from a stab wound with her stolen car parked in the front door of your apartment building? Hadley assures Darrien that she'll thank her for this, eventually. And even if she doesn't, Hadley knows that she did the right thing. Also, get some therapy, Darrien. Geez.
Cuddy and Rachel wait for House to wake up. Rachel says she wants House to come over to play with her like he used to. Cuddy doesn't feel like explaining why that's not going to happen right now, so instead she gets Rachel's hopes up and tells her to write a letter to House about her feelings. Yes, three-year-olds just love writing letters.
Taub shows up at PPTH to see Ruby. He says that when he was a plastic surgeon and made good money (unlike now. Way to hit the doctor jackpot, Ruby!), a middle-aged man came in for a tummy tuck. Preliminary tests showed that wouldn't be happening, since the guy's stomach was "full of cancer" and he was going to die. Taub had to tell him this, and the guy surprised him by not being that upset about it, saying that it was cool he was going to die at age 50 because he raised his kids well. Um, yeah, and now he won't get to see them graduate or get married or have kids of their own, but apparently he doesn't mind that. He knew he was going to leave the world a better place with his kids in it, and when Taub's life flashed before his eyes outside the strip club, he realized what a good thing that could be. This feels like a really selfish reason to want a child, somehow, but whatever. "I want to have this baby," he says, barely able to believe the words that are coming out of his mouth.
Chase finds Hadley in the locker room, thinking about how Darrien did the right thing by killing that guy, but she still couldn't deal with her guilt over it. Understandably, Hadley is worried that the same thing will happen to her. Chase says she should talk to a therapist, and Hadley surprises me by saying that she did, but it "didn't help." Well, it's only been, like, a few months, right? She really should have given it more time to be helpful. Plus, you know those therapy sessions were just the therapist asking Hadley about her life and her feelings and Hadley refusing to answer him because she loves her privacy. "Do you really think you have any idea what it's like to live with something like this?" Hadley asks Chase. As it happens, Hadley isn't that special. Lots of people on this show murder people for what they believe are the right reasons. And Chase is one of them. "Let's grab a coffee," he says. Hadley's eye makeup stays perfect, even with her tears.
Morning finally comes to PPTH. Chase and Hadley arrive for work. They can talk about killing people while they wait for the others to arrive. By the way,
how do they still have jobs after what they did last night? Surely they couldn't get away with trying to treat a patient at home or running scans on her at PPTH under a false name, right? For that matter, how the hell is House not going to be in big trouble for what he did? Whatever. Some time later, Foreman is in, having gotten more sleep last night than anyone else. A sleepy Taub arrives and gets to work. Hadley finds a good case: an Amish kid collapsed while picking up a hooker. It's only then that everyone realizes that House is missing.He's nearby, though. He wakes up for the first time after his surgery. Filled with dread, he feels his leg and hopes it's still there. It is. Even though I still think he'd be better without it at this point. Wilson is at House's bedside instead of Cuddy. Way to finally answer that phone, Wilson! House isn't thrilled to see Wilson, saying he doesn't need the judgment right now. Wilson rolls his eyes and reads the letter Rachel supposedly left for House: "I hope your leg feels better and I hope we can be friends again soon, you bloody scallywag." House doesn't appear touched by Rachel's words, simply saying he has to pee. He refuses to use the pee jug, though, insisting on getting out of bed and walking to the bathroom. But his leg was operated on, like, two hours ago, so he can't do it on his own, no matter how many times he swats Wilson away when he tries to help him. "You're an ass," Wilson says. House admits that's true, although he'd like Wilson to be more specific since there are so many ass things he's done lately. Finally, he allows Wilson to walk him to the bathroom. But first, Wilson has to lecture him: "you can't keep going like this. Something has to change," he says. "I know," House says sadly. And yet, no matter how many times he says or promises this, nothing ever really does seem to change. I have a feeling this will be no different.
You can read more from Sara Morrison at L.A.me, follow her on Twitter, or you can email her at saramorrison@gmail.com.