A young Chinese-American woman returns to her motherland searching for her biological parents. She approaches an elderly couple in a Buddhist temple but receives a less-than-warm welcome: the old woman stares at her blankly while her husband spits on the ground, declaring that they have no daughter. The rejected girl asks her interpreter how to pray in the customary fashion and he instructs her to lift the metal statue of Buddha from the altar before her and speak aloud her desire. She wishes for her parents to understand how badly she needs to know them and have them know her. The interpreter tells her to put down the statue and try to lift it again; if she is unable to, then Buddhism says her wish shall be granted. The second time she tries to lift the metal Buddha, she is unable to. After a brief struggle, she cries out in pain, doubles over, and spits up blood.
Back in the States, House’s mother has been frantically trying to reach her son but he’s ignoring her calls. The team seems more concerned than House does, but he reassures them there’s no need to worry their pretty heads, Mom’s just ringing ‘cause Papa House is dead. Years of neglect, snide comments, abusive tirades, electro-shock, and other imagined or very real cruelty have rendered House cold; he couldn’t seem to care less of the news. Although he typically doesn’t give a fart about his patients either, he does care an iota more about Little Orphan Ang Lee – I know, she’s not technically an orphan (at least we don’t think so), and a male Chinese director has nothing to do with nothing besides ethnicity and rhyming with Annie, but it takes a lot to be this snarky and creative with patient pseudonyms each week, gimme a break! Whatever. House notes that Little Orphan Ang Lee has been known to pass over green tea for the Long Island Iced variety and Chinese physicians have already removed a foot of her bowel but the pain has not decreased.
Taub tries to convince House to return his mother’s call but House deflects by remarking on the bags under his eyes; he deduces that Taub must have confessed his adultery to his wife and they’re on their way to splitsville. Taub assures him that they just sat up all night talking, will work through this rough patch, and now can we get back to you being a prick and avoiding your mother’s calls? Not quite, House Lite (a.k.a., Foreman) focuses on Ang Lee’s chart and all the gibberish they can’t read. House orders the only Asian in the room to get the Chinese doctors’ notes translated, never mind Kutner is of Indian descent and is probably more American than any of them.
Thirteen suggests Meckel’s Diverticulum (a congenital bulge in the small intestine). While considering the best way to detect it, House scratches off a CT scan and colonoscopy (Thank God, I don’t think I can deal with another trip up-the-butt this week) and settles on ultrasound as the fastest method. Foreman makes a last-ditch effort to force House into dealing with his daddy issues by offering to take over the ultrasound while he calls Mom, but House insists he’s fine.
During the ultrasound, House gets up-close and personal with Little Orphan Ang Lee when she coughs in his face. Her adoptive parents arrive with a box of medications she’s been taking. Her mother mentions that they also found alcohol in her apartment; her father asks House if the drinking caused her illness, and if not could he say that it did? House digs in the box and fins a bag of licorice root, a natural treatment for SARS, which doesn’t bode well for him since he just got a face full of spit.
Cuddy finds House in his office and expresses her condolences before whipping out a syringe; as a precaution, everyone who’s been in contact with Little Orphan Ang Lee must receive a shot. After he drops trou, she tries to convince him to go to his father’s funeral but he isn’t listening.
Ang Lee is disturbed by her adoptive family’s hovering. Kutner mumbles from under his face mask that SARS is serious and they have reason to worry. She asks whether the doctor who she coughed on is okay.
Cut to House collapsing on the floor of his office – SARS outbreak!!!
Back in Ang Lee’s room, she begins to experience the same severe pain she had in China along with tachycardia (abnormal rapid heartbeat). Kutner examines her abdomen and determines that her liver is failing, so it can’t be SARS.
Wait a minute. If it’s not SARS, then what’s up with House? He wakes up in the front passenger seat of a moving vehicle with a seddy hangover. Oh, Cuddy, you sly thing! She drugged him to ensure his safe and expeditious delivery to Lexington to attend his father funeral. So, who’s driving the car on this barrel-o’-laughs road trip? Who else? Don’t deny it, you feel kind of warm inside seeing them back together. House and Wilson: reunited and it feels so awkward.
As a favor to House’s mother, Wilson agrees to deliver House to the funeral. Like a puppy or a rambunctious toddler on a leash, House is kept from wandering too far by Vicodin rations and a missing cane.
The team calls House (their ringtone is Hanson’s Mmmmbop, by the way) and tells him that Little Orphan Ang Lee had a hepatic clot. Kutner begins to argue that there appears to be no reason for the clot until Thirteen reminds him that her chain-smoking habit coupled with a genetic disorder could be the culprit. Foreman orders blood drawn for genetic testing.
Kutner goes to Ang Lee’s room and finds her gone. He comes across her outside smoking and determined not to return to bed yet, so he draws blood in the wide open. She expresses continued angst about being an immigrant adoptee and Kutner confides that he too was taken in by kindly Caucasians. (See, this is the stuff Private Dick should’ve found out when digging up background info. Speaking of Dick, where is he this week?) After Kutner takes the blood sample, Ang Lee won’t stop bleeding – which is it going to be, clotting or hemorrhaging?
House asks for a pee break on the road and Wilson almost forces him to use an empty plastic bottle. I’ve always envied man’s ability to handle their business on the move and the whole standing up thing. If I could whiz in a moving vehicle, many of my cross-country, long-distance nightmares wouldn’t haunt me to this day.
At the rest stop, House promises to go to the funeral if Wilson gives him his cane. When Wilson retrieves it from the trunk of his car, House uses it to knock the car keys from his hand and into a storm drain. Wilson rigs up a device to snatch it from the drain, but House throws the flashlight into the darkness with the keys. Wilson warns him that delaying the journey only means that House’s mother will have to delay the funeral – he won’t miss it.
Kutner approaches Foreman, Cameron, and Chase with the new symptom (unstoppable bleeding). Cameron stops ordering a condolence bouquet online and suggests leukemia, but Kutner tells her Ang Lee’s white blood count was normal. Foreman offers up a gastrointestinal tumor and directs Kutner to give her a CT scan. Chase ignores the patient and focuses on House: he doesn’t buy House’s hard act – when his own distant dad died, Chase was so moved he practically killed a patient.
Back on the road, Wilson lectures House about his biological obligation to feel something for his father until House reveals (duh-duh-duhhhhhhhhhhh!) that his dad really isn’t his dad! No wonder he loves the soaps so much! Sherlock House claims to have figured it out at 12 years old based on his father’s location during his conception (on military training exercises off Okinawa), the fact that his dad’s second toe is longer than his big toe (a trait that he doesn’t share), and a red birthmark on his scalp that House shares with a certain friend of the family. Wilson thinks he’s just living in a pre-teen escapist fantasy. House decides to run with the whole childish antics theme and he jams his cane on the gas pedal, forcing Wilson to speed past a cop car. Lights flash, sirens blare, uh-oh.
“Mmmmbop” starts playing just as they’re getting pulled over by the po-po. The team tells House they’ve discovered an 8cm fluid-filled mass in Little Orphan Ang Lee’s pancreas. While House is imparting wisdom through a convoluted analogy involving a steam roller, the police officer snaps his phone shut. Both House and Wilson are thrown across the hood of the car and arrested – wow, they take speeding very seriously in their neck of the woods. Not quite, Wilson has a warrant for his arrest in Louisiana for vandalism, destruction of property, and assault!
The team tries to decipher House’s unfinished metaphor but to no avail. Foreman abandons New Team and runs a diagnostic differential with Old Team. They determine that Ang Lee must be suffering from gallstones. A CT scan confirms it and Chase readies himself for surgery until he notices her urine is brown. Guess it’s not the stones.
In custody, Wilson explains to the arresting officer that the charges are extremely old and he thought they had been taken care of (by House, no less). When he was fresh out of med school, he attended a conference in New Orleans. At the hotel bar, a man kept playing an annoying Billy Joel song on the jukebox. When the man refused to let up, Wilson reacted by throwing a bottle into a 10-foot antique mirror. Through sheer boredom, House ended up bailing him out and that’s how they met. Awwwwww! The officer releases them, not because he’s moved by the story but because the State of Louisiana refuses to pay extradition fees.
On the road again, House receives a call from the team with the latest update. He scoffs at their gallstone theory and suggests multi-systemic cysts. In order to prove it, Thirteen comes up with the idea to inject air bubbles into the cysts and follow their drift patterns. House agrees and hangs up just as they reach Lexington. Mama House actually did wait for her Baby Boy. And she wants him to deliver the eulogy.
Due to muscular twitches from the DT’s, Little Orphan Ang Lee needs to be placed in a phenobarbital-induced coma. Kutner and Taub perform the air bubble procedure. Sometimes a cyst is just a cyst. The patient’s heart tells Taub that it’s advanced dilated cardiomyopathy.
At the podium, House begins his eulogy with an immature vent about bad soldiers and bad fathers. But then a teeny drop of love, respect, whatever, breaks through and he breaks down. He bends over his father’s casket in a final farewell and kisses his forehead. Oh, and he clips a tiny piece of flesh from his earlobe for DNA testing. After the funeral, Wilson expresses his disgust and argues with House over their shared fear of loss. Wilson really loses it and throws a bottle through the funeral parlor’s stained glass window. Guess it takes a bit of déjà violence to finally mend the fences: Wilson later admits that he’s returning to the hospital, his old job, and his old friend.
House calls in and the team tells him about the ultrasound results. Kutner mentions that the images were grainy and House tells him that the speckles indicate iron overload. He orders an MRI but needs to have his curiosity stemmed before the results are in, so he calls Little Orphan Ang Lee’s Chinese interpreter. The only thing the interpreter is able to reveal is the reaction of the alleged biological parents to Ang’s presence. House questions Wilson why a couple would so vehemently deny the existence of their child. When House tells him that she was born in 1983, Wilson is able to conclude that they would deny her because she isn’t supposed to be alive – China implemented a One Child Policy in 1979 and the parents tried to kill her but obviously failed. But how?
When House returns to Princeton Plainsboro, he asks for the MRI results and the team tells him that she started to vomit as soon as the machine was turned on. House tells them that they need to stop the second attempt at the scan before they kill her – he knows what’s wrong. An x-ray reveals three small pins in her brain that her biological parents pushed through the soft spot in her skull as an infant in the hopes of killing her. However, the method was not successful and Ang Lee lived a relatively healthy life through the ripe old age of 25 before a magnet in the base of the Buddha statue in China moved one of the pins, setting off her symptoms.
Kutner explains to her adoptive parents that through surgery, she should make a full recovery. And that they shouldn’t worry about their loser, alcoholic daughter anymore – one of the pins was embedded deeply in the part of her brain that controls addiction. Hopefully, this episode won’t make any druggies out there think they’re accidental addicts too.
Next Week: Skin-emax meets Fox as Thirteen gets involved in some illicit activities (sex, drugs, getting fired).
