Sleeping Dogs Lie

For today's pre-credits scene of doom, we have a woman, in bed with her eyes wide open, listening to her kitchen sink drip. In fact, her home is alive with sound: the radiator, a clock, something in the dining room that I can't figure out but is nonetheless noisy, and then her girlfriend, who wakes up, sees Hannah sitting up on the edge of the bed, and annoyingly asks her whether she's still having trouble sleeping, which is like asking a decaying corpse whether it's having trouble breathing. Girlfriend Max (of course a lesbian is named Max) asks whether there's anything she can do. Hannah's eyeball says no; she's going downstairs to get some wine.

The morning, Max wakes up to find Hannah not in the bed to her, but slumped against the bathroom wall, softly banging her head into it. On the floor is an empty bottle of Generico Sleeping Pills.

One person who isn't having any trouble sleeping is House, who's spending his Clinic hours on an exam table with a medical journal draped across his face to keep the light out. Cuddy startles him awake, and explains to House that he and Wilson have different sleeping schedules, and therefore House is catching up on the zzzs he has lost. Unless House and Wilson are sharing a bed, I don't see how Wilson's routine is keeping House from getting all his beauty rest. With no shame, House turns over to go back to sleep, but Cuddy presents him with a case: a twenty-five-year-old female with "sleep issues." Which, if I may repeat my metaphor, is like saying that a dead guy is having breathing issues. House doesn't find the case very significant, especially after reading that the patient just swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. House makes a crack about twenty-five-year-old women not exactly being rational or emotional rocks, which is pretty funny coming from the epitome of stability and healthy living that is Gregory House. Cuddy persists, saying that the woman hasn't slept in ten days, despite downing that whole bottle of sleeping pills. Since you only live eleven days without REM sleep, House has about a day to cure his new patient.

Back in the meeting room, Cameron slams a copy of the fictional Midwest Journal of Experimental Medicine down on the table and accuses newly-published author Foreman of stealing her article about the time they killed that cancer girl to make her stronger. Cameron claims that Foreman knew she was writing the article and even gave her notes on it, only to turn around and publish his own article about the same thing. House interrupts them with their newest case, which gives Cameron and Foreman even more stuff to fight over, since Cameron thinks they should sedate their patient and Foreman doesn't see the point in doing that, since it won't give her the sleep she needs. Patient discussion over for Cameron, she turns to House and starts barking at him for leaving her article on his desk for the last four months and not doing whatever needed to be done to it so that she could submit it to the medical journal. House would rather get back to their case, but Cameron keeps whining that House read Foreman's article before hers, even though Foreman submitted it to House after she did. House says that he didn't read Foreman's article; he "sighted" it.

House and Chase return to the case, saying that, aside from the sleeping pills and some steroids she was given for a recent poison ivy infection, Hannah has been clean of all drugs. Cameron doesn't care about other people when there's something for her to be indignant about, however, and asks House when he got Foreman's article. "Three weeks ago," he says. Damn, the Midwest Journal publishes fast! Foreman smirks and raises his eyebrows, but stops just short of sticking out his tongue at Cameron. House pulls out his human brain model, and says that they should focus on optic nerve diseases, which can affect sleep. There isn't much else to say about them, since we all know that the first diagnosis is never correct. And, as a special bonus, House says that this should make for a great journal article! Cameron looks homicidal as she volunteers to perform the tests. And while she has every right to be angry and Foreman is a total asshole for going behind her back with that article, I have a feeling that by the end of this episode, I'll be taking his side just because of how obnoxious she'll be about it.

Cameron sets Sleepless Hannah up on some machine that can look inside her eyes, which looks really cool. Things are going well until Foreman strolls in, and they get into their personal shit. Cameron says that she doesn't "see the need to make [Foreman] feel better by forgiving [him]," apparently under the mistaken impression that Foreman feels bad about anything and that this is something they should be discussing in front of a patient. Cameron even has the nerve to tell Foreman that he's being unprofessional by discussing this in front of a patient when she was the one who started it! All Foreman did was ask her if she needed help! It doesn't matter anyway, since Hannah, like most of viewers, is so bored by Cameron's ridiculous childishness that she has fallen asleep. All right! The patient is cured, and we can all go home! Oh, wait -- Hannah has woken up and denies ever having fallen asleep at all.

As House shows us his new way of ingesting Vicodin and giving his lunch a flavorful punch at the same time by crushing up a few pills and sprinkling them over his sandwich, Foreman explains that the optic nerve tests were negative, and that while Hannah is able to sleep for a few seconds at a time, it's only stage one sleep that won't do her any good. House takes a bite out of his Vicodin and roast beef, and asks Foreman where Cameron is, as if he didn't know that she would throw a hissyfit and refuse to talk to House as well as Foreman over the article thing. "Oh, this is gonna work out great," House says, because it's not like he couldn't have avoided the situation and made all of our lives easier by just reading Cameron's freaking article when she gave it to him. Foreman just nods, smiles, and probably thinks about how he can steal House's idea and create a new spice that tastes just like cocaine for the junkie foodie crowd.

House, followed by the Cottages, limps down the hall. He lectures Cameron and Foreman to play nice, and before Cameron can get two words out to accuse House of starting this by reading Foreman's article before hers, House reminds her that he doesn't care and doesn't want to hear any more about it. Instead, House wants to focus on the patient, who is still dying. His latest plan of action is to make Hannah even sicker than she is now, hoping that this will make something show up on their tests that didn't before. The downside of this is that making Hannah sicker will also kill her faster. That's never stopped House before, though! House orders the Cottages to take turns monitoring Hannah and making sure she doesn't fall asleep. Cameron and Foreman will be taking the first four hours of watch, because they did such a great job of keeping Hannah awake before. Chase will smile and enjoy his precious few moments of not being House's least favorite.

Much to Max's displeasure, Cameron and Foreman wake Hannah up from another one of her microsleeps. When Hannah drops off to sleep again, and can't be roused by someone yelling at her, Foreman rolls his eyes and stabs her toe with a needle. Cameron pulls Foreman aside and tells him not to be "cruel," to which Foreman responds that being "nice" doesn't get you anywhere. Especially not published in a medical journal. Max urgently calls them back into the room. "Did she fall asleep again?" Foreman sighs, since this case is too small potatoes for him, now that he's a published author. Hannah has fallen asleep. She's also lying in a pool of her own blood. She must really be tired to fall asleep in a wet bed like that.

House is napping again when the Cottages come knocking. "We've got rectal bleeding," Cameron announces. "All of you?" House responds. Awesome. The Cottages are not as amused by that as I was, though. The blood gave them some more ideas of what's wrong with Hannah, so they decided that they didn't need to keep her awake anymore. Not so, says House. In fact, they won't even be sedating Hannah to do the necessary colonoscopy. Yikes!

Hannah screams in pain. "Can't you hurry?" Max asks, stroking Hannah's forehead, while Chase violates her intestines. "Trust me, you don't want me to hurry," he says. I have to imagine that the pain is like taking the biggest shit ever, but in reverse. TIMES FIVE THOUSAND. As if things weren't bad enough for Hannah, she also has to listen to even more of Cameron's whining about her goddamned article! "How am I supposed to work with him?" Cameron asks Chase, who is trying to do a fucking colonoscopy, Cameron, so maybe this can wait, hmm? Hopefully until the summer hiatus. "Do you think I'm overreacting?" asks Cameron. Hey, if you have to ask, then you probably are. Chase ignores Cameron, and asks Hannah to relax her anus. Max tries to talk Hannah's ass muscles open by telling Hannah to imagine that they're skiing in Vail, instead of here. Lesbians love sports. Meanwhile, Cameron's still on the article thing, and asks Chase what he said about her to Foreman. Chase says that he told Foreman he could have written up any one of their other cases, instead of Cameron's, showing that he's at least a little bit on her side. And then blood starts pouring out of Hannah's nose, so either Chase took a serious wrong turn on that colonoscopy, or Hannah has a new symptom.

Foreman tells House that they got Hannah's nosebleed under control. Cameron comes in with the results of a test that showed nose skin in the rectal bleed. "So the butt bleed's just a nose bleed," Foreman says. For the first and probably last time this episode, Cameron is correct to point something out, saying that all that blood is not "just" anything. Foreman thinks that they're just looking at a massive sinus hemorrhage. All they need to do now is figure out what's causing it. Cameron angrily snaps that they can't just test for the hundreds of things that could cause it, nor should they discount the idea that they've been making Hannah worse on their own. "Do you have any idea what it feels like to have a six-foot-long hose shoved into your large intestine?" Cameron asks. House perks right up at this and responds, "No, but I now have a much greater respect for whichever basketball player you dated in college." OH! NO WAY! NO HE DID NOT! HE DID! Best line ever, even though it's probably racist and totally wrong to say to someone, and ran the risk of Cameron bringing up her Poor Dead Husband. Even Foreman has to turn away and chuckle. Cameron just rolls her eyes and ignores the comment, saying that all the "torture" they've inflicting on Hannah could have raised her blood pressure and made her bleed everywhere. Except that it's more likely that those symptoms are associated with the ten days of sleep she hasn't been getting. I mean, come on, Cameron.

House wonders if that poison ivy Hannah was treated for recently wasn't poison ivy at all. Wegener's granulomatosis has been known to cause a rash, nose bleed, and sleep disturbances, even though the last time it was on this show, they were hoping to diagnose a guy with paralysis with it. Wegener's does all kinds of seemingly unrelated things, it seems. House tells Cameron and Foreman to start treating Hannah for it, while they do some tests to confirm the diagnosis, which we all know they won't. Cameron and Foreman exit the room, with Foreman holding the door open for Cameron. She glares at him and doesn't say thank you. He turns to House and shrugs, all "can you believe that she won't accept my gestures? All I did was rip her off and totally undermine our working relationship for the sake of a journal article! Women are so touchy!"

Clinic time! House's latest patient is an Asian woman, whose teenage daughter translates that she's having really bad menstrual cramps and is "super-depressed." Indeed, the woman does look sad. She also has a bright red nose and watery eyes. House pulls up a chair, and immediately questions that an older non-English-speaking woman would use the term "super-depressed." The teenager continues that her mother was hoping for some birth control pills to alleviate her PMS symptoms. House says it looks more like the woman has a "URI" (Upper Respiratory Infection) as well as an "SAC" (Stupid American Child). If the teenager really wanted to get herself some birth control pills, all she had to do was walk into a free clinic and get some. That's a lot easier than the girl's plan, which was to apparently wait for her mother to get sick, then take her to a Clinic, and use her inability to speak English to get some birth control pills, which she would then switch out for some ineffective over-the-counter cold medicine. House hands the girl a prescription for birth control pills and says she's "not the sharpest chopstick in the drawer," even though I have to say that plan, while unnecessarily complicated and kind of evil, was pretty smart.

House gets approximately zero inches out of the exam room before he's confronted by Cameron, who blocks his egress to yell at him some more about her stupid article. Shut UP, Cameron. House says that he was being lazy by not reading Cameron's article, so he had no idea that Foreman was ripping it off when he put his in front of House and let him sign off on it without actually reading it. Cameron protests that House should have had time to warn her about this, since he has the time to think of "incredibly witty remarks" about Cameron's anal sex life and Cuddy's boobs. House says that he'd rather have Cameron mad at him than Foreman, since Foreman is black, and black people are prone to shooting people they don't like. Yes, he really said that. The only thing that confuses House is why Cameron is always so shocked and upset when people act like human beings and do what benefits them. I'd say it's because the writer of this episode didn't get the memo that Season 2 Cameron is much cooler, sassier, and adult than Season 1 Cameron. Also, as a woman, Cameron is automatically the emotional, optimistic, nave, moral center of the show. All the guys get to be assholes. And Cuddy is just a guy with boobs.

The day, Hannah is looking rough. Foreman is feeling a little guilty about the article thing, and asks Chase whether he thinks he was "out of line." Chase, eager to side with whoever happens to be in the room, points out that Cameron's article would have sat, unread, on House's desk until the end of time, and that Cameron should have known that. Hannah can't take the endless article talk anymore, and her eyes start moving rapidly back and forth. She's having REM, but she isn't asleep. Foreman yells at her until she snaps out of it. As usual, she doesn't remember anything.

House declares that there is no way Hannah was in REM sleep, since she was sitting up, and during REM sleep, your muscles don't work to prevent you from acting out your dreams. So they're looking at some kind of movement disorder and not Wegener's, after all. Cameron and Chase react in a bunch of recycled over-the-shoulder shots that don't really make any sense. Chase brings up rabies as a possible diagnosis, and Cameron says that she's pretty sure Hannah would remember being bitten by a rabid animal. Unless, of course, Hannah is homeless. Hannah did have a dog a month ago, which Max gave her for her birthday, but she had to get rid of it because she's allergic to dogs. House has a different theory as to why Hannah had to give the dog up: "She's just leaving her girlfriend." His proof is that Hannah would have still been on the steroids for her poison ivy when she had the dog, and, therefore, couldn't have had an allergic reaction to it. Instead, Hannah didn't want the dog because it would have been a commitment to Max that Hannah knew she couldn't keep. Therefore, House says, Hannah's current medical issues are not being caused by any allergies. How about guilt? Guilt could probably keep me up for a night. Not ten nights, but then, I'm not the kind of person who prolongs a breakup for over a month and leads my partner on. Chase and Cameron insist on doing an allergy test to find out for sure, figuring that while House's understanding of lesbian relationships is "admittedly keen" (I guess those Classic Lesbian Prison Stories do have some educational value after all!), they'd rather not base their diagnosis on it. Or they could, you know, ask Hannah when Max isn't in the room.

And that ends up being exactly what Cameron does when Max leaves the room to get some soda during Hannah's allergy scratch test. In between blood-coughing fits, Hannah admits that House was right: while Max is a "good person," Hannah has gotten "tired of her." Ironically, that's about all that Hannah is tired of right now. Cameron doesn't come out and say that she now thinks Hannah is a horrible person who deserves to die for not believing in the power of love, but you can see the disdain on her face. Hannah complains that her back hurts, and Cameron checks it out to reveal what is either an insane allergic reaction or some hardcore internal bleeding.

It's the latter. Chase thinks they should look at an aspirin overdose, considering Hannah's known history of taking too many pills and the fact that she's a young woman, and, therefore, crazy in the head. Chase thinks he's really earned House's love now, but House just snaps that Hannah's taking sleeping pills has nothing to do with her mental state. You lose again, Chase. Foreman walks in, and House snaps at him for not being at Hannah's bedside to keep her awake. Foreman says that doesn't matter anymore, since Hannah's liver function tests just came back, and they're "through the sky." Which kind of sounds like he's saying that Hannah's liver is functioning awesomely, but it really means that her liver is dead. Hannah will need a transplant in the six hours or she'll die, and the Evil Transplant Committee isn't about to give a liver out to someone with an undiagnosed illness that will just kill it again. Then again, the Evil Transplant Committee doesn't like to give its precious organs out to anyone, does it? Foreman says that the only option is to test Hannah for whatever conditions can be tested for in six hours. Since there aren't any, they're out of options.

But House won't give up! Hannah and Max have the same blood type, which means they could be an organ match. If Max gives up part of her liver to Hannah, that will buy them some time to save Hannah's life. It's perfect, except for one thing: Cameron is in the room, and she doesn't think it's right for someone to risk her life and give part of her vital organ to someone who's about to dump her ass. House admits that this is tacky, but that won't stop him from making it happen.

House goes into Hannah's room ready to do his very best acting performance. He introduces himself to the ladies and gravely informs the now-orange-colored Hannah that her liver is a dier. Hannah doesn't have much to say about that, since she's half out of her mind from not sleeping. But Max's reaction is exactly what House was banking on: after hearing that Hannah is ineligible for a liver transplant, Max volunteers her own. House acts like that idea never occurred to him. Max tearfully begs him to let her do it, saying that she doesn't care about the risks to herself. Max and House both turn to Hannah, who's keeping herself entertained by doing her impression of a zombie. "You're very lucky to have such a devoted partner," House tells her pointedly. Hannah continues to stare and look extremely scary. House, on the other hand, looks like he might well be feeling just a little bit guilty about the situation himself.

House returns to the meeting room and reports that, with the transplant, they have thirty-six more hours with Hannah, even though I thought she was supposed to have died by now from the lack of sleep thing. Oh well. Of course, Cameron thinks that Max should be told about Hannah's future plans for their relationship before she risks her life to save Hannah's. She's the only person in the room who feels this way, since everyone else is a real doctor. House also points out that if Cameron hadn't insisted on finding out that Hannah was planning to leave Max for sure, this wouldn't be a problem for anyone. True. Everyone tries to get back to saving Hannah's life, but Cameron insists that they have an "ethical dilemma" that must be attended to. "No, we don't," House says. Hannah is their patient. Max isn't. And Hannah's breakup plans are not medical information. And they are medical people who deal in medical things. Cameron seems to have this confused with the role she's picked out for herself here, which, of course, is patient BFF.

Chase and Foreman try to come up with diagnoses, while Cameron whines about how immoral they are, and they come up with either Wilson's disease or a variety of fun and exciting cancers, which are also, in a way, Wilson's disease. Cameron adds her thoughts about how they can help their patient. Just kidding! She's still upset about the Hannah/Max thing. House has finally reached his limit of Cameron preachiness, and yells at her that he thinks influencing Max's decision by telling her something they have no right to know, and therefore killing Hannah after Max decides not to give her any of her liver after all, is a hell of a lot more immoral than minding their own damn business. Cameron has no response to this because House is right. Foreman suggests poisonous mushrooms as a possible cause, which Chase dismisses, since Hannah is a "sports nut" and therefore wouldn't poison her body with drugs. Lesbians love sports. They hate illegal substances. Cameron tries to protest on Max's behalf AGAIN, and maybe she can just go give Hannah her own liver if she feels so strongly about it, and save us all a lot of grief. House lists off a bunch of tests to do on Hannah before and after the transplant -- since your body is so strong and ready for invasive procedures then -- saying that they'll have to do some of them at the same time to make their thirty-six-hour deadline. And, House says, looking directly at the only person this actually applies to, if anyone tells Max that Hannah is going to dump her, that person is fired. Which means that person won't be able to afford any more silly vests. "We have to," Cameron protests, as if the thought of NOT tattling to Max had never even occurred to her. Doctor-patient confidentiality apparently has never occurred to Cameron, either.