Poison

Welcome to the new century! A girl gets busted for cheating on her AP Calculus test via text messages on her cell phone. After getting the answers from her way-too-punked-out-to-be-in-AP-Calculus friend, she stupidly slams her cell phone shut loudly enough that her stereotypically Puritan-outfit-and-glasses-wearing teacher hears it all the way in the front of the room. The teacher marches over to the cheater and demands her cell phone, while a kid in the row starts fidgeting and interrupts to ask to go to the bathroom, or as he calls it, the "bunkroom." Teach says he can in nineteen minutes, when the test is over. "Can't do it!" the kid gasps. I'll bet he'd be embarrassed if he wasn't so about to die. Now everyone in his class will think he has diarrhea and his crush will never agree to go to the prom with him! Teach is still in full-on cheater-catching mode, and asks if the kid has someone with the test answers waiting for him in the bathroom, like he'd wait until nineteen minutes before the test ended to do that. Eventually, Teach agrees to let him use the bathroom as long as he's accompanied by an escort. The kid starts seeing and hearing things, meaning either he's got to go really bad, or he is, as the Cheater Girl says, "really sick." At that point, the kid staggers forward and collapses on the floor. Cheater Girl rushes to his side as Teach yells at her students to keep their eyes on their own work and not on the kid whose eyes are now rolling into the back of his head. Fortunately, Cheater Girl did not use the cell-phone text-messages route when taking her first aid tests, and orders Teach to stop worrying about the AP test and start calling for an ambulance.

For a change, it's Foreman and not Cameron giving House the stats on the latest strange case in the ER. For not a change, House gives his Cottage a hard time about why such a seemingly routine and boring case would be brought to his fleeting attention. He tells Foreman if he cares about the kid so much, he can buy him a card in the gift shop -- preferably one with a good fart joke in it. Boys love fart jokes. They also love, according to House's instadiagnosis, using drugs, which is most likely what's wrong with the kid in the ER. Foreman says that the tox screen was negative, and that he doesn't care about the kid; his interest is purely work-related. I don't know why House is so hung up on whether Foreman has feelings for the kid or his mother, but he takes the case.

We go to the Whiteboard of Symptoms, which has become a Transparent Pane of Symptoms, thereby allowing the camera to do some cool rack focuses between the writing on it and the Cottages. Differential Diagnosis Time! House wants to know how a tox screen would turn up negative when the patient is obviously on drugs, which we know because House said so. Maybe the lab screwed up. Maybe the kid took something that the tox screen doesn't test for, like copy machine toner, which has apparently replaced glue as the legal way kids get high these day. Welcome to the new century. House assigns Foreman to go to the kid's house to find his "stash," figuring Foreman would know all the best hiding places. Foreman protests that he's never even taken drugs. You'd think a current drug addict would be better suited to this task, but I guess if the kid's house has stairs, House is pretty much taken out of the running, so to speak. Cameron is sent to make sure Foreman doesn't dip into any of the kid's battery acid or whatever else it is teens like to do these days.

Chase gets to talk to the patient, named Matt. He asks Matt if he did any drugs. "Pencils down," says Matt. Sounds like a new designer street drug to me. Chase tries to ask again, and Mom comes out from the corner she was hiding in to answer for her son that he doesn't take drugs. Chase says that all parents think their kids don't do drugs, and all of them are wrong, except for Foreman's. Mom says she has proof, too: she secretly gave Matt one of those home drug tests, which doesn't really mean anything if Matt is, in fact, ingesting copy toner. "I didn't want him to know," she says, "because I do trust him." Also because, given what we've seen of Matt's test performance thus far, he might have gone into a panic seizure or something. Chase asks how Mom can both trust her son and give him a secret drug test. Mom doesn't have an answer for that. She just says that all Matt did last night was study and argue with her about proper college interview dress attire. She thinks he should dress like a proper gentleman for them, while Matt wants to wear his own clothes and be himself. She still thinks she's right. Matt protests by having a seizure. House watches the action from outside.

Foreman and Cameron spend time in pleasant suburban New Jersey. They search around Matt's room, and Foreman starts talking about House's little remark about how Foreman would know all the best drug stash locations. Cameron exasperatedly asks if Foreman is going to make this a "racial thing," like the guy who said he hired Cameron because she was hot wouldn't do something like that. Foreman says it's actually because House is an addict himself, and that addicts tend to believe that everyone else is an addict, too. Cameron doesn't think House is an addict. Foreman does. They bicker, and get nowhere, so Cameron changes the subject back to Foreman, and incredulously asks if he really never did any drugs. Foreman asks if this is going to become a "racial thing." Cameron says that deflecting tough questions with a joke is something that a certain alleged Vicodin addict would do. Foreman protests that he's nothing like House. Cameron points out that he's wearing the same "gym shoes," like, is Cameron sixty? Who says "gym shoes"?

Cameron finally makes herself useful by finding some potentially bacteria-contaminated homemade spaghetti sauce in the cupboard. Foreman nods and immediately goes for the fridge to make himself a snack, because we know how he loves to eat his patient's rotten food.

House finds Cameron and Foreman in the lab, testing the tomato sauce. "I'm extremely disappointed in you," he says: he sent them out to discover some kick-ass new drugs and they came back with tomato sauce. Foreman takes a minute to look at House's gym shoes, and sure enough, they are identical to Foreman's. As nothing escapes House's watchful eye, he mutters that he got his online, and probably paid half as much for them as Foreman did. I'm surprised he didn't ask Foreman if his street gang lifted them off some white private-school kid at knifepoint. Cameron says botulism, as well as the thousands of other bacteria the tomato sauce could contain, explains all of Matt's symptoms. House grabs a tongue depressor and uses it to sample some of the sauce, hoping for some acute mental confusion. Cameron sputters. Foreman says he expected House to make some "subtle" display of how they're wrong. House says that, indeed, Matt just had a seizure, which rules out both the contaminated food and the drug overdose theory. They're now thinking he was poisoned, and the nurses have been assigned to skin-washing duties.

Cut to Matt getting scrubbed down by no fewer than three lovely nurses! He's going to so mad that he was too unconscious to remember it.

House's latest Clinic patient is complaining of feeling "good." Really good. She's eighty-two, and suddenly, she's noticing colors and hearing music like she's never noticed or heard before. Plus, she's horny. For men with cute butts...and sexy beards. The man who once asked a nun if she had the hots for him is a little put off by the amorous attentions of a senior citizen, and is a little relieved when she starts talking about Ashton Kutcher, who she saw when her son rented her the wrong video, and whom she hasn't stopped thinking about since. The son, who stands in the corner scoffing at the whole thing, does not immediately leave the room when his mother starts talking about her constant fantasy life, like the rest of us probably would. And really, if you're an eighty-two-year-old woman, Ashton Kutcher really makes sense as an attainable fantasy. We all know how he likes the older ladies. Grandma adds that House looks lot like Ashton: they have the same "bedroom eyes." And now, she'd like to remove her shirt so that House can give her a more thorough examination. House quickly says that is not necessary, but that he will have her admitted to the hospital and order some tests. The son doesn't understand why his flaky old mom's silliness requires an admission to the hospital. House explains that when elderly people have sudden personality changes, it's usually not a good sign. The son, on the other hand, could use a personality change, since he is, as House says, "insufferable."

The A-patient gets some medicine that will clear up the organophosphate poisoning they believe he has. Except that we're still about forty minutes from the end of the episode, so we know that what it will really do is make him worse. Mom complains that her son does not seem to be improving with the medicine, and Chase says it usually takes a little time, but that the bloodwork was conclusive, and there's no need to doubt that Matt was poisoned by a pesticide. Monitors start beeping as Matt's heart rate (I think that's what the number on the monitor thing is) drops. Chase whips out the external pacemaker pad things, which will make Matt's heart beat for him.

After the commercial, Chase tells Mom they're going to keep Matt on the pacemaker pads for another hour and "see what happens." Mom's not too thrilled with this policy.

Back at the office, House and the Cottages try to figure this whole mess out. Cameron wonders if they were wrong about the organophosphate poisoning theory, but Foreman says he ran the tests twice and got the same results. So Cameron suggests giving Matt a stronger medication, earning her a sarcastic smackdown from House, who lives by the theory that there's no need to take a weaker drug when there's a stronger one available. Why take an Advil when you've got an unlimited supply of Vicodin? Foreman says that Columbia has actually been developing drugs for the Army that target the specific poisoning the patient has, and therefore are more effective. So if they find out what exactly Matt was exposed to, they can give him the Army drugs and he'll get better. Chase wants to know what the success rate of this still-experimental drug is, and House responds that he's sure it's very high, because this is the U.S. Army: "Be all you can be." Welcome to the new century, House! The new motto is "an Army of one," which House would probably adopt as his personal mantra if he knew about it. Chase says that the chances of Matt's surviving with the drugs they have available to them are "minimal at best," and House accuses him of having a "stiff-upper-lip-British" way of saying the kid is dead meat. "I'm Australian," Chase says. House says that as long as they put the Queen on their money, it's the same thing. Canadians put the Queen on their money, too, but the only people they ever get confused with are Minnesotans. ["Hey! ...Fine, that is true." -- Wing Chun]

House says they'll go with the Army drugs. Chase reminds them that they need to find out which organophosphate they're dealing with in order to know which drug to administer. "Get all of 'em," House and Foreman say in unison. Foreman's distraught look upon realizing that he and House are becoming twinsies is just great. I really enjoyed him in this episode. Why does Cameron get all the Cottage screentime when Foreman is so much more interesting to watch? While they're waiting for the Army drugs to arrive, House wants the Cottages to figure out what Matt was exposed to. "If we figure out how he got exposed, we'll figure out what he was exposed to," Foreman says. When I said I wanted him to get Cameron's screentime, I didn't mean for him to get her stupid-ass lines. House tells them to start with the vegetable garden from which the main ingredient of Mom's tomato sauce came. Maybe Matt accidentally sprayed himself in the face while spraying the garden with pesticides? Cameron goes to check that out, while Foreman calls the Army and Chase works on keeping Matt from dying. House will have lunch.

Chase does some stuff to the inner workings of Matt's heart while his mother watches and tries not to order everyone around.

Cameron and her ugly drapery coat check out the tool shed.

House enters a patient floor, and is greeted by Wilson, who recites a love poem to the delight of the entire staff:

"Ode to House"

The healer with his magic powers,
I could rub his gentle brow for hours.
His manly chest, his stubbled jaw,
everything about him leaves me raw
with joy. Oh House, your very name,
will never leave this girl the same.

Sorry, all you Wilson/House shipper people, but the poem was not written by Wilson, but by, of course, Grandma Sex. "Chicks with no teeth turn me on," House says. "That's...fairly disgusting," Wilson answers. "And that's ageism," House replies. Wilson tells House to "watch" himself, hands him Grandma's test results, and leaves to write another love poem to House that he can blame on Grandma Sex. House checks out the results and pronounces them "impressive." Then he gets a call from Cameron. Her jealousy detector was pinging, so she decided it was time to remind House of her existence as well as inform him that she found an empty can of disulfoton at Matt's house.

Chase gets ready to administer the Army drugs, but Mom isn't too sure about this; she says that the garden was Matt's school project, and that he wasn't allowed to use pesticides on it, so he dumped out whatever was in that can and put orange peel oil in it, and used that as an organic pesticide. Chase says that Matt was probably cheating on his school project, at which point Cheater Girl and her punk rawk friend come in to visit Matt, hear that their latest cheating scam has been exposed, and run away to dispose of the evidence before they're caught by the AP Gardening test committee. Mom asks what the drugs will do to Matt if they're wrong about the pesticide, and Chase they'll make him worse, which is a moot point since they're not wrong. But Mom has seen this show before, and she knows that the first medicine is always wrong, and won't let Chase give it to her son.

House goes to Cuddy to get a court order to give Matt the drugs. Cuddy doesn't see how they can prove that Mom is mentally incompetent just because she disagrees with House. In fact, some would say that just proves how sane she is. For instance, look at Cameron. When she isn't agreeing with and defending House's diagnoses, she's crying over a centrifuge and making every single case relate to her problems and issues.

House has no choice but to talk to the mother. He's got the refuse-to-consent form for Mom to sign, and he reads it off to her, substituting words like "dies" with "kicks off" for the ease and maximum emotional impact of the listener. "Why are you doing this?" Mom, whose name is now revealed to be "Margo," whines. I've said it before and I'll say it again: no good can come from a character named "Margo." House adds that Margo feels it necessary to control "every single aspect" of her son's life, including the end of it, and would she please sign and initial the bottom of this form? "Who are you?" Margo asks. House says he's Matt's doctor. She needs no introduction, since he knows her as the woman who is letting her kid die. Sign here, please.

Smug and victorious, House tells Cameron that Margo changed her mind and that they can start the process of saving Matt's life. "No," says Cameron. It turns out that yet another student has been admitted to the ER with the same symptoms. Chase gets busy with the critical care and the Magic School Bus Cam gets busy with the CGI lung air sacs. House hopefully asks whether the new patient, named Chi, lives door to Matt. Cameron says the two lives ten miles away, and are completely unrelated to each other except for the fact that they attend the same school.

Chi's parents, who are much nicer and more pleasant than Margo, sob that they live in an apartment with two bamboo trees and no pesticides or fertilizer. My new apartment doesn't have any plants in it, because I am unable to keep even cacti alive, but I just found the biggest and most horrible cockroach in it the other day that was only killed after I hit it with a hammer three times, which means I will be spending the weekend coating the place in as many poisons as I possibly can. Pesticides aren't just for plant lovers anymore!

Cameron and Foreman check out the kids' bathrooms simultaneously and communicate their findings by cell phone. They're not having much luck with a common bathroom item, as the boys use different deodorants and shampoos. Chi uses Johnson's No-Tears Formula, which I didn't think anyone over the age of one used.

Foreman and Cameron call House to report their findings. Welcome to the new century: they've all got three-way-calling on their cell phones AND they know how to use it, putting them all miles ahead of me; I still don't understand how to use the call waiting feature. Every time someone calls on the other line, I end up hanging up on the original call. House suggests checking out the laundry detergent. Both find "TKO" brand laundry detergent, which I assumed was the culprit since it's the only thing mentioned thus far that isn't an actual brand. (I think. At least, I've never seen it in the grocery store.) House tells them to bring in the detergent.

House and Chase enter Chi's room and ask the parents if their "nice, respectful Asian kid" did his nice, respectful Asian laundry this nice, respectful Asian morning. Mom report that Chi doesn't even know how to use a laundry machine, because she likes to keep her clothes cleaning methods an ancient Chinese secret. And anyways, all of Chi's clothes were new and unwashed. Even his underwear, apparently. I would never wear underwear without washing it first, but I'm not a teenage boy, either. Or Asian. ["I know someone who works closely with underwear, and since I know for a fact that when they're alone in the store unpacking their stock, they sometimes crack each other up by putting panties on their heads, you should always wash new underwear before you wear it." -- Wing Chun]

House and Chase go downstairs to see if Matt's jeans are new, too. While they look faded and beat up, House notices that the label is brand-new. Looks like Matt enjoys the shabby chic look. "Hundred dollars for the homeless look," House says. House orders both boys' clothes to be tested. And so it was, by the Cottages, whose knowledge of lab techniques really knows no bounds. I didn't even think hospitals had the equipment to test the pesticide content of fabric.

In House's office, Wilson informs us all that he never washes his new clothes before he wears them, because he wasn't in my seventh-grade Home Economics class, where we had to watch a decades-old film strip about the importance good personal hygiene and washing new clothes before wearing them, the first of which I already knew and the second of which I never imagined would come in handy. And yet, here we are. House twirls his cane and says he's sure Wilson's wife washes his clothes for him. Wilson says she doesn't, because his marriage is In Trouble. Foreman and Chase enter with the lab results. They've identified the poison, but Margo won't let them administer the treatment to her son. I can't imagine why. House tells them to have Cameron try to talk her into it again, but Chase says that won't work this time; only the CDC will get Margo to do anything. "Godot would be faster," Wilson snorts. Yes, but I'll bet waiting for the CDC would be a lot less boring.

House enters Matt's room and hands Margo a mug. She puts it on a counter without drinking it, just in case House slipped her some drug that he thought would help her but is actually fatal. House pulls up a chair, whips out his portable TV and a small bottle of Army drugs, and says he's just going to hang out there in case Margo changes her mind. Margo says she'll make a decision after she hears from the CDC. House says the CDC will probably get back to her in a few days or weeks, and their answer will most likely be that they can't make a decision based solely on Matt's records. Meanwhile, House is pretty sure that soap-opera character "Susie" will never marry her fianc because he's poor. That Susie and her gold-digging ways! And then Margo's cell phone rings. It's the CDC, and they have some problem with Matt's records that prevents them from giving her any advice whatsoever. Margo hates being powerless. She orders House to give Matt the drug.

House leaves the room and walks into Chase, who hands House a cell phone and does his best Southern gentleman CDC official impersonation, which sounds a lot like Matthew McConaughey. House isn't impressed with it, and can't believe it fooled Margo. Aw, give her a break! She's under a lot of pressure.

We wait to see if the drug works in another IV drips/ sick kids/ nervous parents/ hopeful doctors montage. Wilson -- who, I have to point out, is a cancer doctor with absolutely nothing to do with either of these cases -- is there too. Just as House is about to go watch his stories or make some delicious pasta with that new sauce, Wilson calls him back. Matt has opened his eyes, and his heart is working again. Chi does the same.

Cameron's now on wheelchair-pushing duty, a task performed by volunteers Matt's age at the hospital I worked in. They really need to stop spending money on the doctor's lounges and hallway dcor start hiring staff at that place. On the other hand, I think it's best for all concerned if Cameron's contact with patients is limited to pushing them around. Cameron tells Matt that he should make a full recovery, provided that he doesn't wear any more poisoned pants. Matt says he had a feeling they were stolen when he bought them for five bucks out of the back of some guy's truck, but he got them anyway. Well, that's what you get. time, you'll shell out that extra ninety-five dollars, won't you? Was this episode written by the mall? Oh, I'm just mad because my theory about the fake laundry detergent ended up being wrong. Margo says that she's not mad at Matt, and has realized that she needs to be less controlling. So, she's going to "let" Matt spend the week before he retakes the AP test in bed working on his college applications. Baby steps, Margo. Baby steps.

Foreman tells House that their poisoned-pants salesman also worked on a corn field, and used his truck for both jobs. The farm pesticide was spilled on the pants, and the guy didn't bother cleaning it up. Go to Abercrombie and Fitch for all your expensive cruddy jeans needs; mystery solved. They leave for the day, and walk right on into Margo, Matt, and Cameron. Margo says the CDC just called "again." Cameron makes a hilarious "I am outta here before this gets messy!" face and continues wheeling Matt away from what is sure to be a scene of alpha female carnage. But House just says "oops," and Margo walks away with a smile. I have to imagine her reaction would have been somewhat different had Matt died.

Margo catches up to Matt, who asks whom she was just talking to. "They're the arrogant jerks that saved your life," Margo says. You'll notice Cameron was not included in the list of people who saved Matt's life. I'm just saying. House and Foreman enter the elevator together. They look at each other, and then down at their identical gym shoes. Foreman makes a mental note to visit his local mall's Foot Locker, where a variety of exciting shoe brands and styles can be purchased, while House wonders if the fact that he got his pair for cheap online means that they're filled with pesticides.