With Dr. Riley sick, Cuddy bribes House into filling in for the lecture he was supposed to deliver by offering him two hours off clinic duty. On his way to the lecture, he runs into Stacy Warner, an old girlfriend. She asks House to treat her husband Mark, who has been suffering from mysterious health problems.
House presents three stories of patients with leg pain to the medical students. The first story has a farmer come into the hospital after suffering a snake bite on his farm. House's team identifies the snake that likely bit him, and provides the appropriate antivenom, only for the treatment to instead make his condition even worse. The team eventually realizes that the farmer wasn't bitten by a snake, but by his own dog, which he tried to cover up in an effort to prevent said dog from being put down. Unfortunately for him, the time wasted with the incorrect treatment allows a raging infection to set in and virtually destroy his leg tissue below the knee, leading to it being amputated.
The second story sees a teenage volleyball player come into the hospital after collapsing during practice. Cameron's initial diagnosis is a thyroid problem, and treatment for it seems to work, until she suddenly starts experiencing bouts of extreme pain. A full-body scan reveals the actual condition to be early-stage bone cancer, but fortunately the disease is caught at an early enough stage that it can be operated on without any major complications.
The third story involves a middle-aged man — initially Carmen Electra until the students object — suffering a sudden bout of intense pain in his thigh while playing mini-golf. At first, the doctors dismiss his claims as just stories to obtain high-strength painkillers, but realize just a little too late that he's suffered an infarction in his thigh muscle, which has massively and irreparably damaged the tissue.
It turns out that House is actually narrating the incident which crippled him, and he goes on to reveal that he ordered Cuddy, who was the attending doctor, not to amputate the leg. An attempt to restore circulation to the damaged muscle just causes things to go From Bad to Worse and nearly winds up killing him. Despite this, House still refuses amputation and asks to be put in a coma, thinking that the muscle will eventually heal given enough time. Cuddy accedes, but as soon as House is out, Stacy invokes her status as his medical proxy to Take a Third Option. She authorizes Cuddy to undertake an operation she had previously suggested, involving removing the damaged muscle while leaving the rest of the leg intact. House — while still not revealing he's talking about himself — concedes that the operation saved his life and his leg, but severely damaged his quality of life.
After the lecture ends, House calls Stacy and agrees to treat her husband.
Tropes include:
- All for Nothing: The farmer repeatedly lies about what bit him in an effort to prevent his dog from being put down. Not only does House discover the truth, leading to the euthanasia of his dog anyway, but the farmer's lies end up costing him his leg.
- …And That Little Girl Was Me: The third story House gives to the students is about his own leg. He never lets the students know this, though his colleagues who are watching from the back of the lecture and already knew about some of the details figure it out.
- Arc Words: House's mantra that "everybody lies" comes into play in a big way here. While it doesn't apply in any way to the volleyball player — in fact, her problem is if anything she's too truthful with Cameron, which briefly leads the team down the wrong path — the farmer's lies end up costing him his leg, and the doctors' mistakenly assuming that House was lying about his pain in order to acquire drugs ends up crippling him.
- Artistic License – Biology: Actually a plot point; while rattlesnakes aren't completely unheard of in the north-east United States, they'd be more docile due to the colder climate, and in any event they generally don't tend to attack people unless they're threatened. In other words, one probably wouldn't randomly attack the farmer while he was minding his own business doing some work on a fence.
- The Atoner: While previous episodes indicated that Cuddy gave House his Ultimate Job Security purely because he was that good at his job (though it helped that he had tenure), we find out here that she's also motivated in no small part by regret at her part in making House into the person he is.
- Chekhov's Gun: The cup that House periodically drinks from during his lecture turns out to be the reason why Dr. Riley is ill; it's been decorated with lead paint, which has slowly been poisoning Riley every time he drank from it.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Stacy Warner, who had been periodically mentioned throughout the first season and inferred to have been House's last love interest, finally shows up in person here, trying to get House to treat her husband. She's shoved into the background for this episode in order for it to focus on the titular stories, but her husband, Mark, will become the patient in the next episode.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Three stories, three different applications of this trope:
- Played straight with the volleyball player. She has to undergo major surgery and several rounds of chemotherapy, but pulls through and resumes her volleyball career mostly unhindered.
- Zig-zagged with the farmer, who loses his leg and his dog, but eventually becomes adept in the usage of a prosthetic leg, and gets another, apparently much friendlier dog.
- Averted with House himself. After refusing amputation and going through unimaginable suffering from his damaged thigh muscle, the pain of which alone was nearly enough to kill him, he goes into a coma, leading to Cuddy suggesting a treatment which saves his leg by cutting out the damaged muscle. However, everything else we see in the series confirms time and again that this was absolutely, 100% the wrong decision, and that House should have just had the damn thing amputated from the get-go.
- Foreshadowing: The middle-aged man who appears in the third story wears a very similar (though not identical) outfit to House himself, the first clue that he was the actual patient in the story.
- Golden Mean Fallacy: The mistake that Cuddy and Stacy make when deciding on House's treatment, as they seemingly assume the option of cutting out his damaged leg muscle would avoid the extremes of House just trying to let the muscle heal (which clearly wasn't working, and nearly led to him dying from the pain), and cutting the leg off completely (which House didn't want) and therefore balance out. Ultimately, while it ended up not being the worst option of the three, everything else we see in the series indicates that amputation would have been the right decision all along.
- Ignored Expert: House had more of an idea of what was wrong than the attending doctors, who initially dismissed him as a drug addict and then were clueless as to what was causing his pain. Unfortunately, House himself didn't come to the correct diagnosis until his thigh muscle was irreparably damaged.
- Insistent Terminology: When one of the students describes Carmen Electra as "the Baywatch chick", House insists that she be referred to as "the Baywatch thespian."
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: After the initial attempt at treating the farmer goes horribly wrong, House calls a coffee break for his lecture, which leads into the episode's first commercial break.
- Ms. Fanservice: Carmen Electra during the initial version of the third story. House is naturally bummed when the students force him to swap her out.
- Near-Death Experience: House apparently experiences one of these after the indescribable pain of his damaged leg muscle causes his heart to stop, and hallucinates the farmer walking his new dog and adjusting his artificial leg, and the volleyball player resuming her career, leg fully intact. Of course, Unreliable Narrator is at play here, seeing how it's established that House had his current team treating those cases, and he didn't employ them until years after his leg infarction.
- The Other Darrin: Played for laughs; House randomly swaps Carmen Electra into the farmer's role for the scene where he inspects her leg, before switching back to the actual farmer, and has the farmer standing in for the volleyball player before one of the students points out that most volleyball players generally aren't middle-aged men.
- The Reveal: We already knew the general details of House's leg infarction from the pilot episode, but this episode further reveals just how much hell he went through, in addition to the fact that Cuddy was the attending doctor.
- Secret Test of Character: The man in the third story gets a catheter shoved up his urethra with no anaesthetic in order to get a urine sample, the implication being that someone actually in as much pain as the man claims to be will be barely in any more discomfort than they already are, while a mere drug addict will probably just run away and find some other doctor to try scamming.
- Skewed Priorities: One of the students notices that the farmer seems more concerned about what will happen to his dog than finding out that he won't survive until the following day. House smirks, as it turns out that this is what clued House in that he wasn't really bitten by a snake.
- Tragic Mistake:
- A whole bunch of them are revealed to have piled up and ruined House's life, key among them being the doctors dismissing him as a drug addict when he suffered his infarction, misdiagnosing the cause of his pain several times, then House refusing to have his leg amputated, and then Stacy accepting Cuddy's suggestion of just cutting out the damaged muscle.
- In the farmer's case, not telling the truth earlier costs him his leg and fails to save his dog. Mostly averted in the case of the volleyball player, as Cameron's initial misdiagnosis wasted the team's time, but fortunately the cancer wasn't anywhere close to the point where the loss of a day or so on the initial diagnosis would have made any difference.
- Unreliable Narrator: Played for laughs, with House initially claiming the patient of the third story to be Carmen Electra. Even the more naive among the medical students quickly see through this, though it takes House's team to realize that the "middle-aged man" who replaces Electra in the story is in fact House himself. Even then, he still takes liberties with things like his Near-Death Experience.
- Wall of Blather: Cameron delivers one relating to the volleyball player's personal life, before finally arriving at the point she's trying to make, namely that there's an odd growth on her thyroid.
