House Who's Your Daddy

16-06-2006 11:22

16-year-old Hurricane Katrina victim Leona is brought to House by his former bandmate Crandall, who has recently found out that she is his daughter. Crandall explains that Leona – whose grandfather was Jesse Baker, a famous jazz musician that they both idolised – is suffering from a heart condition and hallucinations, and also lost her mother in the hurricane.

House takes the case on, despite suspecting that his friend is being scammed. He wants to do a paternity test, but Crandall refuses. The team soon establish that Leona’s hallucinations are being caused by her heart complaint, but after they fix the damage, Leona has another hallucination. Despite Cameron’s doubts, Chase insists that Leona’s heart is fine and so her visions must have another cause.

House agrees and suggests that she might have a disease that translates pain into bizarre physiological responses like the hallucinations.

House decides to test her reaction to pain and, after wiring her up to a machine and promising that the proceedure won’t hurt, jams a syringe into her palm. Leona screams, but Foreman reports that her reactions are normal. House then jams the syringe into her thigh, grills her about Crandall and her real father and bends her middle finger backwards. Crandall rushes into the room to stop him – just as the scan lights up and Leona starts to hallucinate. The test has confirmed that Leona has an auto-immune disease, but they don’t know which one. House suggests killing them all at once.

Cameron points out that this requires replacing her entire immune system, which requires a bone marrow transplant from an exact match. Crandall barges into House’s office to reassert that he is Leona’s father and demands that House test his marrow, but still refuses a paternity test.

Although Crandall is not a suitable donor, a match is found in the marrow registry. However, while Leona is preparing for the transplant, House notices black goo oozing out of her mouth. It is a mixture of her stools and digested blood, meaning Leona must not only have internal bleeding, but there must also be a blockage forcing the material up and out of her mouth. Foreman suggests she has liver failure, which prompts House to conclude that they are wrong about the auto-immune disease – no disease could shut down an organ in two hours.

House retreats to his office to play some of Jesse Baker’s music to the team. He wants them to hear an uncut portion when a drunken Jesse rails at an engineer for not tuning his piano correctly. House believes that his aural perception was off, and combined with Jesse’s fatal liver failure, diagnoses him an inability to process iron – a genetic disease.

House takes the doctors to Leona’s room and shows them a picture from Crandall’s book about Jesse. Leona was 13 then, and her skin is noticeably darker now. House attributes this to a mixture of iron deposits and excess melatonin in her skin, which backs up his theory. An MRI scan confirms that there is a large amount of iron on Leona’s liver, so the team begin treating her. But as the medicine drips into her bloodstream, she starts gasping for breath. A further scan reveals that her lungs are full of holes. Chase thinks her time is up.

Foreman isn’t ready to give up and wonders if she could have a fungal infection. However, there are 25 antifungal medicines and not enough time to try them all. They begin treating her for the most common fungus, but Leona’s lungs soon collapse – they have evidently diagnosed the wrong one. It’s vital they find out what she could have been exposed to – if she was living anywhere other than the children’s shelter she claims was her home before Crandall rescued her, she could die before they determine which treatment she needs. Is Leona telling the truth about everything – or is House right and Crandall really being taken for ride?

Also this week, Cuddy asks House to review two medical files, and it doesn’t take long for him to figure out that she's looking for a sperm donor. But House takes the search a step further and sets Cuddy up for a big surprise...