Fools for Love

Fools for Love

Director(s)

David Platt

Writer(s)

Peter Blake

Airdate

October 31, 2006

Episode number

3.05

TV.com rating

8.7/10

Guest star(s)

Jurnee Smollett, Scott Allen Rinker, Brett Wagner, Kimberly Quinn, Ricky Ullman, David Morse

Final diagnosis

Hereditary Angioedema

Zebra Factor

7/10

House: “How did you know the dad was racist?“

Foreman: “He beat up his son for dating a black girl. I extrapolated from that.“

House: “You see racism everywhere. Maybe he just didn’t like this black girl.“

— Fools for Love

Fools for Love is a third season episode of House which first aired on October 31, 2006. House treats a young black woman who has trouble breathing. However, as the mystery deepens, her devoted young white husband seems to come down with the same illness, but he refuses to let them test his wife and insists they leave him untreated so he can undergo the dangerous tests instead. When no answer presents itself, House realizes the answer may threaten the couple’s relationship. Meanwhile, House refuses to make peace with an angry clinic patient.

This is the first episode of the “Tritter arc”, which lasted until the episode “Words and Deeds”.

Recap

During an aborted robbery attempt at a diner, a beautiful young woman, who had been threatened with rape but had been saved by her husband, is suddenly unable to breathe.

The team starts to discuss the case, but House is distracted by Wilson talking to a new nurse from pediatrics. House goes to break them up by telling her about Wilson cutting through his cane. The nurse already knows House by reputation. When the nurse goes on her way, House reminds Wilson about his three failed marriages. Wilson denies that he is having a relationship with her, but House thinks he’s lying.

Meanwhile, Cameron still wants to talk about the patient’s anaphylaxis and pain. She didn’t get it from the robber who coughed on her; he is healthy if injured from his encounter with the husband. House agrees with Chase who thinks it might be salmonella and orders treatment.

The patient denies smoking a lot of marijuana, which is where they suspect the salmonella comes from, but agrees to the antibiotics. However, the patient develops a rash which appears to indicate an allergy to the antibiotics. This leads House to believe it might be stress related anaphylaxis. He bets Foreman $100 that there will be a reaction during a stress test.

Foreman performs the test, and while the patient is on the treadmill, her husband starts having the same pain symptoms in his chest and stomach.

House tells Foreman he won the bet, even though the wrong person had the reaction. Foreman finally pays up. They start going through a new differential while House breaks into the nurse’s locker. Foreman tells House Wilson isn’t dating her. House finds jazz tickets but no jazz CDs, which leads him to believe that she’s trying to please Wilson. They bet $200 that House is right. House tells his team to test for anything they could have gotten from the same source, like an infection or an environmental toxin.

Chase and Foreman go to the patients’ home. Chase finds condoms, leading him to believe that the husband is cheating. House is convinced that one of them is cheating, even though Foreman thinks they love each other. Chase points out that an STD would explain their symptoms. House goes to confront the patients, but the wife says they were just being extra-cautious so they don’t become pregnant. The husband, who is white while his wife is black, thinks Foreman is racist. House orders Foreman to take the wife off steroids to see if she develops a fever.

The wife starts hallucinating that she sees her husband’s dead father, then goes into a coma. The coma gets progressively worse. The husband tells Foreman that his father broke his arm and threatened his wife when they were 13 and living next door to each other and started getting friendly. They ran away from home when they were 16 and got married when they both became 20 years old.

No fever develops, so it can’t be an infection, and it’s not environmental because no one else they know has the symptoms. Foreman thinks it might be two different diseases, but House thinks it might be sarcoidosis, even though there is no known environmental cause that would explain it.

House goes to Wilson for a second opinion about the sarcoidosis, but he is really there to show Wilson the nurse’s personnel file. Wilson still denies he’s dating her and accuses House of hoping he will have bad relationships so he will have more time for him. Wilson doesn’t think it’s sarcoidosis. Despite this, House wants to do a brain stem biopsy on the wife. Cameron refuses to let House ask the husband for consent, because his condition puts him in in a conflict of interest and the risks are too high. Cuddy agrees with Cameron, but agrees to let Wilson talk to the husband if House apologizes to the clinic patient.

Wilson talks to the husband. The husband is reluctant because his wife is so smart, and instead proposes they stop treating him so they can biopsy him instead. House is furious with Wilson for letting that happen. House orders the husband’s morphine cut off, but his team won’t do it, so House fakes out his team and injects the husband with an opiate blocker to put him in pain. Foreman tries to help, but House has locked the medicine cabinet. Foreman manages to give the patient a tranquilizer. The husband says he would die for his wife.

The husband gets worse, but the problem hasn’t spread to his brain so they still can’t do a biopsy. The wife is getting worse and the husband is vomiting blood. Cameron thinks it is something non-contagious and non-environmental. Foreman thinks they have different diseases. They think the husband’s bowel is dead and House orders repair and biopsy, but tests show the bowel is still alive, but just has edema and inflammation.

They start another differential. House wonders why the father beat up his son. Foreman thinks he was racist, but House states it was odd he was only racist to Tracy before he starts asking the team about genetic diseases. He thinks its hereditary angioedema, but it’s incredibly rare and the fact that they both have it would mean that they share a parent: the seemingly abusive father who had an affair with Tracy’s mother. From the father‘s behavior, he was upset his children were dating each other and may have had the disease as well, hence the pills. Foreman and the others are shocked by the theory and since they don’t have time to test, House tells them to start treating them for it. The wife improves, showing House was right.

Foreman doesn’t want to tell the patients that they are related until they have had a chance to recover, but House says it is inevitable that they will find out and the risk to any children is too high. Foreman gives them the pills to treat it and lets them know that it is genetic and that there is next to no chance that two unrelated people would both have it, so they need a DNA test for both of them. When the husband questions how they could be related, Foreman reluctantly reveals to them that they may have the same father. Tracy is disgusted while Jeremy tries to say this cannot be real but Tracy figures out that the reason people say that she and her husband have the same eyes and she is lighter than both of her parents is that they have the same father. Foreman tries to tell them they still feel for each other, (“There’s no way you could’ve known, you didn’t fight during car rides together or change each other’s diapers, you just met and fell in love and the bond you two share isn’t going change anything“) but Tracy can’t be consoled and eventually gets her own room.

As Foreman goes to leave, he meets up with the nurse that House thought Wilson was dating and collects his $200 from House. Foreman asks his date if she really likes jazz and she admits she doesn’t. She just wants to spend time with Foreman. However, as they leave, Foreman tells his date that he will meet her in a little while, as he goes to console the husband over his wife’s decision to get her own room.

Wilson finds himself alone in a hotel room. Cuddy’s pregnancy test is negative. Driving on his motorcycle, House gets arrested.

Major Events

• House begins to suspect that Wilson is in a relationship with a new nurse named Wendy.
• Clinic patient Michael Tritter is introduced for the first time.
• While in the clinic, House meets a patient named Michael Tritter who stands up to him, and in an act of petty retribution sticks a rectal thermometer in the patient’s rectum before leaving the room for two hours.
• House and Foreman take a bet over Wilson and Wendy being together.
• It is eventually discovered that the married couple are actually related due to having the same father.
• House learns that it is Foreman, not Wilson who’s going out with Wendy. As a result, House grudgingly hands over two hundred dollars to Foreman.
• Tritter returns and it’s revealed that he’s a police officer.
• House gets arrested for possession of narcotics.

Zebra Factor 7/10

Hereditary angioedema is a very rare condition.

Trivia & Cultural References

• The Poconos are a mountainous vacation area in northeastern Pennsylvania.
• The reference to Tritter being a Rotarian is a reference to Rotary International, a service club with over 1 million members in over 33,000 clubs worldwide.
• The title makes reference to the play “Fools for Love” by Sam Shepard.
• During the scene in which Cuddy makes House confront Tritter in her office, the boom mic can be seen seen briefly when they begin talking.
• After stopping House for speeding, officer Tritter reasons that House is under the influence of narcotics, based on his observation that House’s pupils are dilated. House, however, uses Vicodin, a hydrocodone-containing drug which, if anything, would cause pupillary constriction (miosis).  
• In real life, Tritter could be potentially sued for abuse of power for hunting down and arresting House on the excuse of drug abuse. He also wouldn’t be able to arrest House if the pills were in a prescription bottle with his name on them.

Clinic Patient

House treats a 50-ish male who is complaining of a rash on his groin and the two hour wait. House diagnoses him with dry skin from his nicotine gum and refuses to test him for STDs. When House tries to leave, the patient trips him. House takes a swab for testing, then asks to take the patient’s body temperature rectally on the pretense that the nicotine gum interferes with an oral reading. House inserts the thermometer, then leaves the room, throws away the sample and leaves the clinic.

Cuddy tells House to apologize to the patient—the patient has threatened to kill House and Cuddy points out that what House did was assault.

Cuddy finally gets House in the same room as the patient. The patient tells House he doesn’t want to sue him, but does want to beat him up. He calls House a bully and says he will accept an apology. House tells the patient that he can tell his friends he scared the doctor and he can tell Cuddy he apologized, but both of them will be lying. House refuses to apologize.

As House is riding home on his motorcycle, he is pulled over by a police car. Out steps the patient himself, who has ostensibly stopped House for speeding. House doesn’t have his vehicle documents on him. The patient tells House that he noticed that House was taking pills during the examination, and makes an excuse to search him. The patient finds House’s Vicodin and arrests him for possession of a narcotic.

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