TV on DVD Buzz

This week’s TV on DVD Season I am going through and doing wrap ups of is the three two-sided disc House, M.D. Season 1 set. I will be posting about one side of a disc each day until this Saturday. This wrap up is of the content on Side A of Disc 1.

“Pilot” - A teacher collapses in a seizure in front of her class. Wilson tries to convince House to take the case by saying it is his cousin. House thinks it is too boring of a case and is probably just brain cancer. Talking with his team House says they are doctors to treat illnesses and not patients and that he does not see patients because they lie and so he does not have to lie. Cuddy approaches House about not doing his job (i.e. clinic hours and being six years behind on his duties). After she pulls his authorization for doing things like MRIs he folds to doing clinic hours, although he does not plan on being caught up until 2054. The patient goes into anaphylactic shock while they are doing the MRI. The patient loses her eyesight before having another seizure. House decides to have them stop all treatment in order to figure out how fast she is dying to figure out what of there three theories might be right. Cameron and Foreman break into the patient’s house to see if they can find anything that might explain her illness. Foreman realizes that Wilson lied about the patient being his cousin. House suspects that the patient has a tape worm. The patient does not want any more treatment and would rather go home to die. When he goes to try to convince the patient to do the tape worm treatment he ends up explaining that his leg got the way it is due to an infarction. Chase comes up with the idea to X-Ray her to find a worm and convince her that there is one in her brain, too. They find one in the leg and she agrees to take the pills. In the end House explains his reason for hiring Cameron was she was pretty, Foreman for his criminal record (just theft, I think), and Chase because his father made a call.

“Paternity” - A teenager becomes disoriented and has double vision while playing a lacrosse game. House has Cameron answer his mail and ends up with the teenager coming in as a patient. The patient’s symptoms include night terrors. House is about to dismiss the case, but notices a myoclonic jerk in the teenager’s leg. House is convinced that the patient’s father is not his actual father. They believe the symptoms are due to pressure in the brain. In the clinic House deals with a parent that refuses to vaccinate her baby. The next diagnosis is MS with him having less than five years left to live. After hearing about this diagnosis the teenager disappears from his room and ends up being found on the roof having a hallucination. The hallucination makes the MS diagnosis be another misdiagnosis. House gets the drink cups from the patient’s parents to run a paternity test to prove the father is not the father, but it turns out neither are his biological parents since the teenager was adopted. It turns out that the biological mother was not vaccinated and the teenager has a mutation of measles. The treatment this time is successful and in the end House watches the teenager play in a lacrosse match.

“Occam’s Razor” - A man passes out while having intercourse with his fiancee. With the amount of symptoms there does not seem that there is two conditions. Foreman brings up the idea of Occam’s Razor that the simplest solution is the diagnosis (i.e. only one diagnosis makes more sense than there being two things at once). House decides two things are the diagnosis, but Cameron is convinced it has to be one thing and does a bunch of tests. Houses’s first idea ends up being wrong as the patient’s white blood cell count drops way down and they have to put him in a clean room. House thinks the patient was taking a gout medicine when he was supposed to be having a cough medicine. They think that there was a mistake in filling his prescription, but when Chase goes down to the pharmacy it turns out he did have at least pills that looked like his cough medicine. House gets his I got it moment and then goes right into the clean room to announce that it has to do with the patient using drugs. In the end it turns out the old cough pills did not have a letter on the back and House goes through the hospital pharmacy to figure out what the pills were that were originally in the cough medicine prescription.

“Maternity” - A newborn baby has a seizure. House hears about the issue when he is in the OBGYN lounge. House believes there is an infection spreading in the maternity ward. Cuddy does not believe him at first because there are just two somewhat unrelated baby cases. Then another baby displays symptoms and a fourth potential baby infected is noticed. Two of the babies are having kidney failure after they are put on the two drugs. House wants one taken off one of the drugs and the other taken off the other drug, so that they can find out which one is working. One of the babies heart stops and dies while Chase keeps trying to restart its heart. It leads them to believe that the rest of the babies should be put on the other drug, however the other baby then starts getting sicker as well. House does an autopsy on the baby that died. They start blood tests to try to figure out what it is. They test the mothers because they believe it is related to antibodies the mothers pass on to the babies that determines the ones that got sick or not. They figure out what it is and treat the babies. In the end House also figures out how the babies got the illness.