History NightmareFuel / House

* "Babies and Bathwater" in season one forced a to choose between saving his wife and his unborn child. He chose his wife, but then complications ensued and she started to bleed to death with no way to save her. The husband then had to give the doctors permission to actively kill his wife by removing the baby or else both mother and baby would die - the only decision, really, but still incredibly difficult to have to go through with.

* Season 3 episode: the rats in "Informed Consent" a researcher has a medical episode and his rats start chewing on him. Anyone who's had pets and been afraid of dying in the same way will shudder.

* When House jumps off the balcony and into the swimming pool in "Out of the Chute" (Season 7) it appears to viewers and the onlooking Wilson that he's going to commit suicide. His behavior is so manic and impenetrable that it might really have been one of his options in the wake of his breakup with Cuddy.

* Season 7's "After Hours". House performing surgery on his own leg with the intent on cutting out tumors was bad enough, but then his hand had to start shaking and the scalpel slipped and the blood and the shaky cam... It might just be the most nightmarish sequence in the series. You can't help but ''feel'' House's growing panic as the pain gets to unbearable for him to continue.

* Remember "Not Cancer", the Season 5 episode with the four dead transplant patients from five years ago, where the fifth hallucinated, without segue or warning, that House (otherwise perfectly in character) was performing an impromptu capitoectomy with a meat cleaver? Watch one of your favorite characters, one who occasionally carries out seemingly irrational medical procedures, attempt to ''remove a patient's head'' without batting an eye. To say nothing of the death montage at the beginning of the episode, where the other transplant recipients all drop dead for no obvious reason.

* Season 7's "After Hours". House performing surgery on his own leg with the intent on cutting out tumors was bad enough, but then his hand had to start shaking and the scalpel slipped and the blood and the shaky cam...

* [[OhCrap The last few seconds of]] [[NiceJobBreakingItHero "Fall From Grace".]] It turns out that the team saved a cannibalistic serial killer.

* None of these hold a candle to the Season 5 endgame starting from the moment Kutner kills himself. The penultimate episode of the season turned House's increase in mental instability UpToEleven. Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think...

* ''House'' throws in some more-or-less RealLife {{Squick}}fest whenever possible. The Season 2 finale "No Reason" features a man whose body organs swell up and sometimes explode, including his tongue, testicles and an eyeball. It all turns out to be an hallucination on Dr. House's part.

* The psychopath in Season 6's "Remorse". That creepy glance she shot at Dr. Hadley was priceless.

* House's BreakingSpeech to Martha Masters in "Family Practice". She litteraly has to go puke afterwards.

* In the season 1 episode Paternity, House walks into a patient's room, casually ties him down and then amputates his toe with bolt cutters (it's just a hallucination).

* The season 2 episode "Sleeping Dogs Lie" the patient of the week is completely unable to sleep despite being exhausted which leads her to down an ''entire bottle of sleeping pills''. Worse yet, this still doesn't allow her to sleep, resulting in her partner finding her banging her head against the wall to the point where she starts bleeding, repeating that she [[MadnessMantra "just wants to sleep"]]. The insanely jerky camera movements during all of this really doesn't help either. Then it turns out she's infected by TheBlackDeath.

* Season 3 The hallucinations that the boy has in "Cane and Able".
* Another one from Season 3 - "Que Será Será", where a man is having a hole drilled through his skull so that his brain can be directly injected with something that is believed to be a cure for his unexplained coma. Not long after the needle's stuck through his brain, he completely loses his vision. Which, understandably, causes him to panic. And then try to break out from the chair, completely disregarding the fact that his skull's wide open and there's a needle stuck through his brain. It's later found out that he didn't go blind from a needle punching through the wrong parts of his brain, it was actually an unfortunate effect of terminal lung cancer - which had also caused his coma.

* Season 1, Episode 7, "Fidelity". A woman suffering from a sleeping disorder that knocks her out for two thirds of the day seizes up, graphically aspirates (medical jargon for "pukes up stuff she didn't eat into a tube."). But the sheer horror comes when she complains of an itch on her arm. She claws at it, only for it to '''balloon up like a massive bubble, then erupt into swarms of black spiders.''' The fact that she's hallucinating the whole horrid thing does nothing to mitigate the nightmarishness of it all.

* In season 3's "Insensitive", a girl who was [[FeelNoPain physically incapable of feeling pain]] was brought into surgery without anesthesia. House cuts her stomach open while she's watching, producing a 25-ft tapeworm that he proceeds to extract before her eyes.

** Which, incidentally, is [[RippedFromTheHeadlines based on]] [[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/30/the-itch a true story.]].
* Episode 19, Season 5, appropriately titled "Locked In," in which a patient is locked inside his own body, unable to move, communicate, or even do much to indicate he's alive, but remains [[AndIMustScream fully aware]]. He's almost autopsied before the episode even gets underway. Try not to think about that too much.

%%--->'''Amber:''' ''Do we''?

** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V5ytuJaqyw&t=390s The worst moment comes when he fully realizes just how bad the hallucinations have gotten]]. Seeing Amber's ghost was creepy enough. But Kutner's ghost makes it much, ''much'' more terrifying; House's mind is gone, and all that's left is a vision of death.
--->''House's face is in frame, slightly to the right. Then Amber's ghost comes onscreen from the left, right next to his face''.\\
'''Amber''': ''(Whispering) So. This is the story you made up about who you are. It's a nice one''.\\

'''Kutner''': ''(Somberly) Too bad it isn't true''.\\

--->''Foreman's face is in frame. Switch frame to the patient''.\\
'''The patient''': ''It's a black hole''.\\
'''Foreman''': ''She's hallucinating''.\\
'''Taub''': ''I certainly hope so''.

'''As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked [[Administrivia/SpoilersOff as per policy.]] Administrivia/YouHaveBeenWarned.'''

** At one point, the team puts the patient into an induced coma to keep the sheer agony from killing him. Monitoring his brain activity shows that ''he's still in pain.''
* "Forever" from Season 2 has a father leaving his wife and new baby to go to work even though he is sick. At the door he decides he is too sick to go so returns upstairs, where he finds his wife having some sort of seizure in the tub. That's scary enough. Then he turns and sees his newborn baby in the bottom of the tub. To any parent that is more horrifying than drowning yourself. Towards the end of the episode, we see the mother ''smothering her own child.''

** Perhaps the worst moment comes at the end, when House takes control of the robot surgeon and slices the man open from stomach to chest with the intent of killing him so the hallucination will end. This takes just long enough to make you wonder if maybe he was wrong about everything being a hallucination, and he might have just actually killed a man. Alternately, of course, House might have been putting the man out of his misery. In a very, very '''VERY''' loose sense of the word.

* Season 3 episode: the rats in "Informed Consent." a researcher has a medical episode and his rats start chewing on him. Anyone who's had pets and been afraid of dying in the same way will shudder.

** For extra effect, most of the root causes of the diseases they handle have innocuous origins. One woman nearly dies from an infection from a tick. An epidemic in the maternity ward severely afflicts six infants and [[DeathOfAChild kills one,]] originating from an elderly care worker who coughed on their teddy bears. A boy nearly dies from an infection acquired from the pitcher's mound where he practices baseball. A father and son end up with rare, exotic parasites from a fishing trip. So many nearly-fatal illnesses invoke DiabolusExNihilo, the show almost seems to be trying to induce germophobia.

''The camera briefly goes back to Amber's ghost, who gives him a little smile. Then it goes back to Kutner's ghost, who gives House a cold, unblinking stare. It's at this moment when House finally breaks.''