- House takes on a case where the patient has unexplained blackouts, and his daughter may hold the key to the diagnosis. Meanwhile, Cuddy prepares for her new arrival until there are complications with the birth mother.
- House (Hugh Laurie) and Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein) hooked up! OK, they just kissed. But, House and Cuddy hooked up! We'll get back to that later. But, House and Cuddy hooked up!
But we digress...:We opened on a guy having some serious issues in his kitchen, apparently pouring himself cups of coffee from a row of coffee makers on his counter, and dumping them into the sink. He is marking down results on a clipboard. His 12 year old daughter comes in and he asks her if she called a friend to spend the night (it's her birthday). She tells him that when he has a friend over, so will she. She leaves for school and suddenly is home again, telling him that it is 4:30pm. He has lost time. Later he blinks and is sitting in the living room with her, again losing hours. His daughter was equally flabbergasted by his bizarre behavior. She finally asked him what was wrong and he said, "I don't know."
Cue: awesome theme music.
Cuddy was giddy about her adoption approval and handed House the case of the messed-up, coffee-drinking guy. House knew Cuddy was meeting the mother of a baby she would be getting and Cuddy admitted the woman was delivering a baby girl in two weeks. The birth mother had confessed to "some past meth use." House told Cuddy "you're not equipped to handle a real kid, let alone a factory second." Cuddy said she wasn't going to change her mind about adopting.
The coffee guy was a consumer product tester who worked at home and the team was trying to figure out his problem.
Thirteen (Olivia Wilde) and Taub (Peter Jacoboson) went to check the guy's house and found a barren room where his young daughter lived. Taub said single people shouldn't have kids. They found some mold in the baseboards of the apartment. It's never mold. Back at the hospital, Thirteen did some tests on the daughter. The girl said she was four when "the accident happened" and her mother died. She said, completely stone faced, that she didn't "get what the big deal about death is." Thirteen and Foreman (Omar Epps) saw the patient trying to leave the hospital and they realized he was sleepwalking.
Foreman insisted sleepwalking wasn't a diagnosis if they didn't know why he was sleepwalking. House realized they were only going to find out what the guy was up to if they let him walk out his dreams while sleeping.
Cuddy went to meet the birth mother, Becca (Vanessa Zima), at a diner. She just had one question for Cuddy, which was what she was going to name the baby. Cuddy said she was thinking about "Joy." The girl said she didn't want her daughter raised by a loser, which her mother had been, and she had been, which was why she was giving the baby up to Cuddy despite her being a single parent. Cuddy saw a rash on the girl's wrist, but she insisted she hadn't used since she found out she was pregnant.
Cuddy worried it was a viral infection, but Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) said it was just a heat rash. Cuddy admitted the woman to the hospital, but Cameron thought she was overreacting. She wanted a full fetal workup. House said she was having irrational fears. House spilled "baby barf" all over Cuddy's sweater, to give her a feel of what it'll be like when she's barfed on eight times a day.
Taub and Thirteen followed the sleepwalker as he drove around town and stops to talk to a woman in an alley. Thirteen seemed to know instantly the woman was a drug dealer and not a prostitute. She and Taub go to the man's car and find cocaine. House later tells them to get some of the cocaine for testing. Taub reminds him it's a felony, but he doesn't care.
Cameron and Cuddy did an ultrasound and found that the baby's lungs were underdeveloped, meaning they had to put off the birth to protect the baby.
Taub and Thirteen set off to buy the drugs. The dealer, Sadie (Janice Allen) sold them "good stuff," but Thirteen objected and said she didn't want the "good, get the new customer hooked stuff," she wanted the "stepped down, keep the old customer coming back stuff." Taub was a little taken aback but how much Thirteen seemed to know about the street-level drug trade.
House continued to tell Cuddy she was being selfish by wanting a child to give him "unconditional love." He knocked over a lamp in her office to portend what she could expect when the girl grows up. Cuddy was with Becca in her room when she started bleeding. The woman had a placental abruption and she was losing blood. The solution would be to deliver the baby, but the premature lungs in the baby created the ultimate dilemma: deliver now, risk the baby; deliver later, risk the mom. Cuddy knew the mother would do whatever she told her to do. House said she should deliver now (risking the baby), but when Cuddy agreed, he knew something was wrong. He said you can give the mom more blood, you can't give the baby more lungs. He decided some part of Cuddy didn't want the baby.
Wilson (Robert Sean Wilson) told House he was just upset because Cuddy was moving to another stage in her life and leaving him behind. House wasn't buying that.
Meanwhile, Taub decided the cocaine was causing the sleepwalking guy's problem. Oh, but wait... the guy was sweating blood. They tested for leukemia.
The birth mother asked Cuddy what she'd do and Cuddy said she should wait. "But if I wait, I could die," the girl said. She wondered if Cuddy was giving her opinion as a doctor or as a mother. The girl said she didn't want to wait, she'd "sacrificed nine months for this stupid mistake, I don't want to sacrifice anymore." Cuddy told her she had a chance to break the cycle of parenting mistakes her mother and grandmother had made. "No," she said.
Just as Taub and Kutner (Kal Penn) had jammed the needle into the sleepwalker to test the guy's bone marrow for leukemia, they noticed his skin was dark on his arm. "That means it's not leukemia," Kutner said. The team decided the sleepwalker might need a kidney transplant, so they thought about testing his daughter for a match. They needed Cuddy's approval for such a move because the daughter was a minor and her dad had a conflict of interest. "She's kind of busy," Taub said.
Cut to Cuddy in surgery, where the adoptive mother was having her baby delivered via Cesarean section by Chase (Jesse Spencer), under Cuddy's watchful eye. House barged into the operating room and asked Cuddy about the sleepwalker's daughter. "Later," she said. "Later's too late," House said. Just then, Chase pulled the baby out but it wasn't crying at first. Cuddy held her and the mother said, "She's yours now."
"Mazel tov," House said. Then demanded she get back to work. She talked to the daughter about the risks of surgery. The girl said she understood the risks, but House said he couldn't proceed. He realized the girl had whatever her dad had -- she was sleepwalking.
Thirteen discovered the girl was sweating blood, too. They had to run tests for a genetic disease. House asked Wilson for a genetic disease that would fit the symptoms, but Wilson just kept talking about Cuddy's new baby. He reiterated House thought adopting was "a cheat" and that it wasn't a real baby. House got that familiar look of epiphany and Wilson said, "I've just given you the answer, haven't I? And now you're going to walk away without saying a word." House does walk out, but adds one word, "Nope". Nice one, Wilson.
House said he knew what they had and they'd be fine, but when they had no reactions, he said they were "anhedonic," incapable of feeling pleasure. Foreman said the most common cause of anhedonia is schizophrenia. "Sure, in white folk," House said, revealing that they were lying about their backgrounds. The father's name was Jamal Hamoud (Salvator Xuereh). He changed it when the U.S. invaded Iraq the first time. House told him they had Familial Mediterranean Fever, a disease contracted by people of Mediterranean decent. The symptoms were set off by age and stress. House said the treatment could be hit or miss because of the disease's advanced stage.
Cuddy was painting her nursery yellow and Thirteen was watching over the patients. Cuddy smiled as she looked around the room. The medication worked on the sleepwalker and his daughter, as they both smiled for the first time in a while.
Cuddy visited the birth mother, who told Cuddy that she wants to be brave and secure, like Cuddy. "I don't want to be a loser," she told Cuddy. "When I saw you hold her, and the look on your face, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen." She decided she didn't want to give up the baby. She said her life had "always been about pain and anger and disappointment, and it's never been about love; and I can't give that away." Cuddy tried to tell her not to make sure a huge decision that easily. "It's a decision that changes everything; it changes the rest of your life," Cuddy said. "I hope so," the girl replied.
Cuddy went to the nursery and cried as she touched the baby's tiny hand, then she went and sat alone in the freshly painted nursery. House knocked on the door. He told Cuddy there were more babies out there, but she said she was "done." She couldn't go through that again. "It's too bad, you would've been a good mother," House said. Cuddy gets really ticked off. She snaps at him that when she had the baby he told her she would suck as a mother, now that she doesn't that she would be a good one. She asks why he needs to negate everything. He looks stunned and mumbles something like "I don't know".
Then they kissed. Long and deep and passionate. Then House left.
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