Act Your Age (House)

"Act Your Age" is the nineteenth episode of the third season (Season 3 Ep. 19) of House and the sixty-fifth episode overall.

Plot

The episode opens with a young boy, Jasper, who is suffering from a severe nose-bleed; the family situation is quickly revealed. While his father and teacher discuss his aggressive behavior, his six-year-old sister, Lucy, suffers a heart attack caused by constrictive pericarditis. Over the course of the episode she develops more symptoms that are usually only exhibited by elderly people, such as arthritis and a stroke. Exploring the patient's house, they find a bloody T-shirt stuffed into a heating vent. Suspecting child abuse at first, the team runs tests and finds that the girl has been menstruating at the age of six. Shallow cuts around the genital area found in a previous exam were attributed to her trying to remove pubic hair with her father's razor.

House and his team are baffled, but the breakthrough comes when Jasper, who is eight, goes into a rage when Chase acts affectionately towards Cameron on whom the boy had a crush. It turns out that both children had been affected by their father's sexual-enhancement cream and were going through puberty early. Their father had been using the cream to "keep up" with his much younger girlfriend, who is his children's teacher.

Wilson confronts House in his office, he tells House that he plans to kiss Cuddy, but this is a ploy since he knew about House sending him flowers in Cuddy's name after they attended a play together, since "Men only see plays with women they want to see naked". While Chase gives Cameron flowers after their break-up in the previous episode. As Jasper and Lucy leave the hospital with their father and teacher, House and Cuddy talk about the "May–October pairing" House ends the conversation with the line "I got tickets to a play".

External links

• FOX.com – House official site