House: She Gets Knocked Down, But She Gets Up Again

Breaking News! Last night on House, Wilson didn’t piss me off as much as usual. Huzzah! He did that same old “Dude, you can’t use a teenage girl as a guinea pig in a risky procedure that could lead to a cure for your chronic pain” routine, but it somehow seemed fresher and less irritating. Maybe it was because he actually joked around a little, instead of being Wilson: Arbiter of All That Is Just and Right in This World.

Our Patient of the Week is a teenage girl who has never been able to feel pain, got in a car accident with her mom, and is now slowly going insane in the membrane (insane in the brain). She gets increasingly paranoid, guilty, feverish, and paralyzed (yeah, bummer) until House figures out that she’s deficient in B-12. (Incidentally, B-12 is the only vitamin you absolutely have to fortify your diet with if you’re vegan, and this episode made me pull my supplements out of the drawer and take, like, eight.) But wait, she already had a shot of B-12 when she was admitted! Hmmm...mysterious.

As it turns out, much as House is the parasite living off Wilson’s food and draining him of his sanity, a giant, disgusting tapeworm is living in our patient’s gut, eating all her B-12 and making her cuh-raaazy. Money shot: House holds her down as she’s screaming and raving, cuts into her without anesthetic, and pulls out the tapeworm.

Oh, and we have some touching Valentines Day stories, too. House ruins Cuddy’s promising blind date, leading Cuddy to (semi-facetiously?) ask whether House “likes her” (check “yes” or “no”). Foreman has a confusing breakup with his nurse girlfriend who I had totally forgotten about—it has something to do with buying her tuition to nurse practitioner school, and I can’t say I really care that much either way. And Cameron asks Chase to be friends with benefits in the most clinical, least hot way possible (“We work together, you weren’t all girly and weird after we slept together before, and there’s no way I’ll fall in love with you.”). Who says romance is dead?