The Downside of Sapphic Love

Last week on House: lesbians! Whooo!!!! Oh, wait. They never even once wear lingerie. Well, on with the recap then. We open on a woman lying in bed, completely awake and tortured by the sound of the faucet, the heater, the clock, you name it. Her girlfriend lies next to her completely asleep until Hannah jumps up. Hannah says she’s going to get a glass of wine, but the next morning her girlfriend discovers her banging her head on the wall in the kitchen, an empty bottle of sleeping pills by her side.

Oh, irony of ironies, House is passed out in an exam room, a magazine over his face. Apparently Wilson is ruining his sleep schedule. Ahem. Cuddy suggests kicking Wilson out, but House isn’t hearing it. Ahem again. Cuddy has brought Hannah’s case to his attention, and House, ever so shockingly, doesn’t believe that Hannah hasn’t slept in ten days. Without REM your brain starts shutting down. I think Cuddy would know that. House is finally convinced when Cuddy reports that even an entire bottle of sleeping pills couldn’t make Hannah sleep. “I know what gets you off!” she says. I’ll bet you do, Cuddy. I’ll bet you do.
Oooh, trouble amongst the Outhouses! Cameron is accusing Foreman of stealing her article, something she was writing up for a medical journal about the little girl with cancer they had a while back. Cameron doesn’t give a shit about the patient; she is on a roll with her righteous fury. She does volunteer to give Hannah an optic test, though. Foreman comes in an asks if she needs any help, with just leads to more bickering. It’s tedious enough that Hannah actually falls asleep! Only for about 10 seconds, but it’s in the REM stage, which explains why she hasn’t gone crazy or died yet, if she’s having these 10 second naps occasionally.

Foreman and House discuss the case in the cafeteria as House sprinkles his drugs on his sandwich, which is Reuben. Nice callback to House’s earlier scenes with sandwiches. House decides Hannah needs to be kept awake so that she’ll display more symptoms and they can fix her up. Foreman gets bored of gently waking Hannah, so he sticks a needle in her foot. You know, Cameron is insufferable, but Foreman is kind of a meanie. Shortly thereafter, Hannah starts bleeding from her butt. Between this episode and the last, I think the writers may have some sort of anal fixation.

The Outhouses walk in and report that “we’ve got rectal bleeding.” “What, all of you?” asks House. Nice one, buddy. House orders a colonoscopy – without sedation. Man, he makes you love him with the humor and the snark, and then pushes you away with the extreme cruelty. Hannah is clearly suffering while Chase does the procedure. Cameron may come across as a bleeding heart, but I think here we have proof that she’s actually a self-obsessed troll. She has no concept of Hannah on the table; she’s too focused on her own anus. It takes massive quantities of blood pouring out of Hannah’s nose to get Cameron’s attention.

In the meeting room, House tries the oldest trick for getting a guy and a girl to stop fighting: saying they lurve each other. It doesn’t work, so Hose makes inappropriate comments re: Cameron and anal sex. Speaking of which, he heads into the clinic for our “sex is evil” portion of the evening, where a young girl is helping her non-English-speaking mother obtain birth control pills. Well, she’s really helping herself and using her mother’s cold as a front. House sees right through it, of course. Cameron is waiting for House outside the exam room, and jumps on him for approving Foreman’s article before hers. He’s not really making any bones about it – he approved Foreman’s because Cameron’s annoying but Foreman’s actually scary and liable to “bust a cap in my ass” if angered. As Cameron strides off, House also calls her out of her Pollyanna-ness that makes her so surprised by human nature all the time.

Chase and Foreman are examining Hannah when her eyes start moving back and forth just like REM. Her eyes are open, though. In the meeting room, House doesn’t think it was REM, and goes through a windy path that leads up to an adopted dog that was quickly given up and Hannah wanting to leave her girlfriend. Hannah’s girlfriend gave her a dog for her birthday, but Hannah claimed allergies. This would have been impossible since Hannah was on steroids for her “poison oak” rash at the time. As Cameron performs a scratch test to see if Hannah has any other allergies, she pushes the issue until Hannah admits that she is indeed planning on leaving her girlfriend. See, House does understand lesbians!

Foreman comes in with rather startling news – her liver is completely dead, and she’s only got about six hours left. House knows that Hannah and her girlfriend have the same blood type, so he wants her to donate half her liver to Hannah. Cameron is outraged at the idea, the very idea! House tries a little subterfuge by explaining to Hannah that she’s going to die, because there’s no time for a diagnosis, which leads to her girlfriend begging to donate her own liver. House seems taken aback by the whole idea, but finally “relents.” Cheeky!

Cameron is completely up in arms, of course, and wants Hannah’s girlfriend Max to know that her half-a-liver self is going to get dumped. House argues that letting Hannah die is also immoral. Cameron is weird. The battles she chooses don’t fit with earthling logic. House orders a round of tests and adds “anyone says anything to Max, they’re fired.” He does want Cuddy to become Max’s doctor, though, so that he can clear himself of any ethical quandaries regarding Max and Hannah’s somewhat opposing interests.

Cameron is being a HUGE bitch in Hannah’s room, shoving a tube down her throat into her stomach and berating her at the same time. Hannah wonders pointedly if Cameron herself would be willing to die in the name of honesty.

Cameron puts Max and Hannah together before the surgery. It looks like Hannah is about to come clean with Max when House barges in and starts Hannah’s sedation. He give Cameron what-for, telling her that she can’t always expect people to do the right thing. This is why she was screwed over by Foreman, because she didn’t expect anyone else to write the same article.

As Cuddy watches the surgery, she asks Cameron what the deal is between Max and Hannah. “Did you read Foreman’s article?” responds Cameron. Damn, woman. Get a hobby. Cuddy basically laughs at Cameron’s pain and tells her to write another article. Once again, I love Cuddy.

Aaaaannnd, this is where my TV dropped out for about a minute, so next thing I know Foreman is telling Hannah that they have to take her off all her drugs because they’re suppressing the cause of her illness. I guess things are getting too heavy because House heads back to the clinic, where the girl and her mother are back, the mother complaining of tender breasts now. Because the girl gave the birth control to her mom and the decongestant to herself. That is too stupid for words. I’m actually not even sure it’s possible to be that stupid. In other news, House speaks Mandarin!

On the flip side, I’m not sure it’s possible to be as smart as House is supposed to be. After much medical jargon, House asks where the dog Hannah owned briefly was from. A place called Blue Barrel Kennels, reports Cameron. House instantly know that Blue Barrel is a type of cactus, so the dog must have come from out of state. See? That’s too much knowledge for one head.

They head over to Hannah, where House acts weird for a bit and then finds some sores on Hannah’s underarm. He takes a sample from one and the fluid is black like tar. Ugh, gross. She has the black plague! Weird! Apparently fleas in the southwest don’t differentiate between domestic dogs and prairie dogs, so they traveled on Hannah’s dog and made her sick. Just last week there was a woman in L.A. who was diagnosed with the plague, which is either a weird coincidence or a genius marketing campaign for this show.

Cameron chats with Max and quickly learns that she knows Hannah wants to dump her. “She can’t leave me now,” smirks Max. Ai, they had the wrong girlfriend pegged as a creep.

Cameron approaches Foreman in the hopes of putting their argument behind them. She thinks they should apologize to each other. “We’re not friends, we’re colleagues,” says Foreman. “And I don’t have anything to apologize for.” Yikes, what a meanie! In the next room, House is dead asleep. I don’t know if that’s a bit of humor or if it’s a hint that House himself is sick. What do you think?