bironic

For a story about a woman who scratched through her head into her brain, as well as a fascinating discussion on the nature and origins of pain and a bizarrely successful therapy for phantom limb pain, I highly recommend The Itch by Atul Gawande (The New Yorker).

Last week-wise, if you're interested in a more sustained treatment of what it means to consider having children when you have Huntington's, try Facing Life with a Lethal Gene by Amy Harmon (The New York Times; Pulitzer Prize-winning essay).

On tonight's ep, superficially:

My TV-watching partner is back, so I missed a lot of stuff that was going on on the show. But I did make him shut up for the Wilson scenes, so I can say that I was delighted—delighted!—to see him interact with someone in his field, to get a tiny itty bitty bit of backstory with the mention of the Chicago conference where they had some kind of conversation (since I guess despite expectations they didn't sleep together), to have it spelled out more or less that he's a clinician and not a researcher, to have him mention the people he treats and often watches die and how that's hard for him (no matter what House says), and to have him perform a medical procedure in a gown again. It's been a while. Gosh darn it, I wish Wilson had done my biopsy last year. Then it would've been almost pleasant. Anyway, all that and the quiet scenes of him washing dishes* compensated for the guilt trip he laid on Dr. Dana Whoever and the fact that he discussed his personal life with a patient. I guess it was a nice change from when House does the same.

*No matter, apparently, that he had a dishwasher in the apartment.**

**And, ha! So it is Amber's place he's been living in.

Not much to say on the House & Cuddy front; this whole arc has just gotten weird. Ditto on the Foreman/Thirteen. I like Thirteen, and Foreman's decision process was clear enough, but like her, I didn't understand why he'd make a choice like that when they'd only been dating for a week, and why he wouldn't consult with her. His half of the double-blind trial was already screwed; why not ask her if she wanted to be on placebo or the drug? And why the drug would cause that side effect so quickly when none of Foreman's other patients exhibited symptoms after many more weeks on the therapy is a mystery.

I'm also trying not to think about Cuddy's mood swings, House's comments re: same, and the fact that all of this patient's problems were centered in her uterus, because of the theme of hysteria/irrationality it evokes, suggesting that her decision to leave medicine wasn't the right one. Also, gross. Also, anticlimactic. Also, how did that cause all of her earlier symptoms again?

Ethical questions about a person's responsibility to use his or her gifts and knowledge to benefit humanity versus being personally happy, I guess? If this were a season one episode, that would've been explored more. Or maybe it was and I was just distracted.

In sum: It is now canon that House has slept overnight on Wilson's office couch when he couldn't or didn't want to go home.


...Doing work now. Honest.