Forever (House)

"Forever" is the twenty-second (22nd) episode of the second season of House, which premiered on the Fox network on May 9, 2006.

Plot

The episode starts with a man heading out the door to work. As he progresses down the stairs, the stairwell begins to sway, and he vomits. Brent Mason (Kip Pardue) goes back home and finds his wife Kara (Hillary Tuck) in the bathtub having a seizure, and their newborn infant, Mikey, drowning.

Chase, who is working in both the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and the Diagnostics department, takes the case and asks House for help. Foreman returns after his near-death experience in the last two episodes. He is suffering from mild memory loss but is in a very good mood. Throughout the episode, he does not argue with House's ideas, which annoys House.

Mikey seems fine until his lung collapses. House says it is caused by bacterial problems, and Chase starts Mikey on ECMO. When the treatment appears to be working, he returns to Kara, who is attempting to smother Mikey and says she is hearing voices. Although House initially saves him with CPR, the baby eventually dies from a heart attack caused by rising potassium due to kidney damage from the smothering attempt. Chase feels guilty that he did not do enough, even though there was nothing to prevent death from happening eventually due to the organ damage. House starts to think that both Kara and Mikey had the same problem, so he directs Chase to autopsy Mikey. He also diagnoses the father as being hung-over the morning of the drowning and that he'd been ignoring his wife's symptoms.

After examining Mikey, Chase realizes that the baby has flattened intestinal villi. House and Wilson think that Kara and Mikey have Coeliac disease, explaining her bleeding due to Vitamin K deficiency and pellagra due to vitamin B₃ deficiency, and leaves her susceptible to cancer which Wilson realizes she has. This also explains Mikey's death despite Chase's best efforts: his Coeliac disease prevented the medication that could have saved him from working on him. Neither of them are successful in convincing her to receive treatment, including her husband. Kara wishes to die because she believes she was fully responsible for Mikey's death, even though she was powerless to do anything else than what the "voices" said that she should do.

Meanwhile House and Wilson try to find out why Cuddy asked Wilson to have dinner with her. House buys her trash from a janitor to investigate. He finds a box of red clover, which among other things is used by cancer patients. House believes the date is a consult.

Wilson later runs a PCR test on Cuddy's spoon. The results show that she is negative for all cancer markers, but House notices that her estrogen is unusually high. He talks to Cuddy, who reveals that the red clover was a herbal booster for fertility, and that she was considering Wilson as a sperm donor. House keeps this a secret, and tells Wilson that Cuddy had some skin lesions.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Forever

• "Forever" at Fox.com
• "Forever" at the Internet Movie Database
• "Forever" at TV.com