House enters the hospital to find it teeming with coughing people and medical personnel. House immediately turns around to leave, but Cuddy has already spotted him. She explains that the pre-credits judge had a "virulent" form of bacterial meningitis, thereby exposing the twenty-five hundred people in attendance to it as well. What I want to know is, is there a form of meningitis that isn't "virulent"? All area hospitals are packed with the exposed, who are all being a bunch of hypochondriacs with the coughing since I don't think there's any way that meningitis could have spread that widely and that quickly, and this one is no exception. They need everyone they can get to see and clear all the exposed people. House says that since they already have the diagnosis, he won't be needed and will just get in everyone's way, but Joe the Security Guard was apparently briefed on what to expect and stops him from leaving. Cuddy says that no one leaves the quarantine area without a blue slip, meaning that House is trapped in his own Personal Hell of endless hypochondriac patients for the foreseeable future. Exposing twenty-five hundred people to a fatal disease just to get back at House may seem a little extravagant, but Vogler said himself that he likes to do things big.
Patient #1 has a fever of one hundred and two, earning him a trip to the second floor, because if you're going to catch a virulent form of an already fatal disease, you might as well get a little bit of view as a consolation prize. The patient strolls away, not seeming at all upset about his possible future as a bloody-eared corpse.
Wilson's patient fares better, getting a clean bill of health that entitles her to two red pills and one blue "I'm healthy, let me out of here before I actually do catch meningitis!" slip.
House's patient is meningitis-free, so she gets a special bonus insta-diagnosis that her mischievous teenage daughter has been borrowing her clothes to look older and sneak into bars. House figures all this out because of an old stain on the woman's otherwise freshly dry-cleaned clothes, and he's totally wrong. The annoyed woman says she doesn't have a daughter. This just leaves her with Option #2, which was House's little joke about her husband being a secret cross-dresser. Whoops, but I think we all could have seen this coming. Ain't no way a rebellious teenage girl is going to borrow her mother's clothes, no matter how many bars it will get her into.
Chase's patient has also been assigned to the second floor, and he takes the news a bit more realistically, with a slight freak-out that he's going to die. Chase sends him off on his way.
“ Mary nervously asks if the surrounding cabinets are actually filled with dead people, and Foreman says he 'hopes' so. I wouldn't be surprised to find a few of the hospital's more demanding doctors locked away in there, though, courtesy of one Nurse Brenda. ”
You'll notice that House didn't volunteer any of his own break time. That's because he needs it to get lectured at by Wilson for torturing Chase instead of just out-and-out firing him. As they carefully avoid a puddle of freshly-spewed vomit, House says that he doesn't want to fire someone for trying to save his own job. Wilson says that Chase deserves to be fired for screwing House over, but then House spots Cuddy on the horizon and they focus their efforts on escaping her wrath. Despite their evasive maneuvers, it is not to be, and she lectures them both for taking a coffee break while the rest of the staff busts its ass for the epidemic. House responds by holding up a chart to shield his eyes from Cuddy's distracting display of cleavage. He accomplishes the unusual feat of throwing her off a bit, and she defensively says "it got hot," so she had to remove her blazer (not like that does a much better job of covering anything up), and that House should stop acting like a thirteen-year-old. House does little to prove himself more mature than that by referring to Cuddy's breasts as "fun bags," while Wilson just stands there and hilariously sneaks peeks at the Bags of Fun himself. Cuddy tells House that his three o'clock interview for Cameron's position is in his office. Wilson looks at cleavage. House protests that the hospital's current state of epidemic emergency makes him way too busy to do piddly interviews, and he's right about that. I don't see how the epidemic is so pressing that a girl has to sit out her internal bleeding on a couch, but not so much that House can do some interviews. I hope he sends all the interviewees up to the psych ward for willingly walking into a quarantined area. Wilson volunteers to pinch a nipple...er, "do the interviews for House," but Cuddy wants House to do them himself and hire the first decent applicant he gets so that they'll have another person on staff for epidemic duty, whose needs for medical personnel is so great that two doctors are excused from it to do job interviews.
Nurse Brenda is back, and she's meaner than ever! She refuses to give Foreman any staff members or even a sterile environment for Mary's bone marrow aspiration, which, unlike that lumbar puncture or the endoscopy, can't be done in a germy crowded hallway. Foreman tells Brenda that the stakes are high: if Mary doesn't have that bone marrow test, she could die. "At least she'll have a bed, then," Brenda replies unsympathetically. I swear, whoever writes this show must have had experiences with nurses as bad as some of mine. I really hope that before this episode ends, one of Brenda's loved ones is admitted with a mysterious illness that Foreman is only too happy to say he doesn't have the resources or the time to cure. At least when they do the autopsy, though, they'll figure out what was wrong with her.
Speaking of autopsies, Foreman has an idea. We cut to Mary lying on the sterile environment of the morgue's autopsy table. Mary nervously asks if the surrounding cabinets are actually filled with dead people, and Foreman says he "hopes" so, which I'm guessing was not the answer Mary was looking for. I wouldn't be surprised to find a few of the hospital's more demanding doctors locked away in there, though, courtesy of one Nurse Brenda. Foreman tells Mary to try to relax as he jabs a needle through her bone. She grips the side of the autopsy table, because she already had that lumbar puncture, so she has an idea of what to expect.
“ By the way, being able to identify a woman's Prada shoes from a distance of thirty feet is so gay that it's heterosexual again, so there is no hoyay in this scene. ”
House returns to his office to find Wilson and his interviewee waiting. He apologizes, saying he had to "take a dump." The interviewee is a sassy young thing who immediately replies that she's sure it's better to interview right after a dump than before it. House is thrown off a bit by the witty retort, and downs a few pills to steady himself as he asks Dr. Sass if she actually speaks four languages, or just wrote it on her rsum to look good. Dr. Sass sasses that she can swear in six. Wilson raises his eyebrows. House asks Dr. Sass why she's leaving her current job; did she fall in love with her boss, or did he fall in love with her? Wilson's eyebrows continue their ascent, and he mutters something about that being a reasonable question, since almost all fellowships end that way. Dr. Sass just says it was "nothing like that," and House immediately asks her if she's Jewish. Dr. Sass says she is indeed, and House's question is whether or not what they say about Jewish foreplay is true. "Uh-uh-uh -- " says Wilson, who knows House better than anyone and still wasn't expecting him to ask a question as wildly inappropriate as that. But Dr. Sass will not be thrown! She says it's "two hours of begging." House says he heard it was four. "I'm only half Jewish," Dr. Sassenstein admits. Wilson just looks back and forth between the two, searching for the family resemblance that must be there as Dr. Sassenstein is obviously House's secret daughter. Dr. Sassenstein says she knows all about how House likes to say inappropriate things for reactions, but that she grew up with four brothers, so she can take whatever he throws at her as long as he keeps his hands to himself. House says nothing, and Wilson calls an end to the interview. House even shakes the hand Dr. Sassenstein offers, something he wouldn't do for Cameron (HA!), and watches her feet as she walks out.
The second Dr. Sassenstein's gone, Wilson triumphantly shouts that they've found their "Hitler," and I'm not sure who would be more insulted by the Hitler-Jew comparison; Hitler, or the Jew. "No way," says House. Wilson can't believe it; Dr. Sassenstein is perfect in every way! House managed to find something wrong with her, though: her shoes. Wilson says that Dr. Sassenstein's Pradas mean she has good taste, and House snaps that Wilson wouldn't know a Prada "if one stepped on [his] scrotum." Thanks for the visual, there, House. By the way, being able to identify a woman's Prada shoes from a distance of thirty feet is so gay that it's heterosexual again, so there is no hoyay in this scene. House's point, so to speak, about the shoes is that they're stylishly pointy high heels that are "very painful" to wear, meaning Dr. Sassenstein is one of those "incredibly shallow, insecure" women who would rather be in pain all day and look good than wear tennis shoes. "And that's exactly the type I don't need around here," House says. Yeah, because Cameron had so much self-esteem that she quit her job because her boss wouldn't date her and those bustier-vests she wears really demonstrate comfortable at the sake of fashion. And let's not get started on Cuddy's choice of attire. ["And furthermore, just because she'd wear those shoes to her interview doesn't mean she'd wear them on the job." -- Wing Chun] Wilson snaps that, if anything, House needs someone who can handle a lot of pain.