A 16 year old boy is brought into the clinic complaining of night terrors and double vision after a head injury while playing lacrosse. Meanwhile, House goes to great lengths to avoid work. The patient’s parents come to house saying he had accepted to take the case. House initially thinks the patient had been abused and dismissed the case, until the patient has a myoclonic jerk — a muscle spasm normally seen in people falling asleep. This then intrigues House, who admits the patient.
House requests a EEG — to read brain activity, and also start betting on if the father is the biological one. The patient has a night terrors with the dream played out as House cutting off the patient's toe.
The patient’s test come back normal, but the MRI showed bowing in the corpus callosum — the bit between the two hemispheres of the brain. The team drain the fluid in the patient's brain to clear it. The team test the fluid, thinking it might be Multiple Sclerosis. However, the disease is progressing too quickly.
During the night, the patient goes missing. The team find him on the hospital roof, thinking he is on the lacrosse field. Chase arrives in time to prevent him from falling off the roof.
House starts to think the patient has a brain infection. It is suggested he has syphilis. They suggest dosing the brain with penicillin. The parents disagree, saying the patient has not had sex. Meanwhile Cuddy finds out about the paternity bet.
As the tests on the patient come back negative, the DNA tests on the parents come back with a result, which provides the answer to the case.
Meanwhile, in the clinic, House examines a young infant, whose mother is against vaccines.
Tropes include:
- Artistic License – Medicine: It is highly unethical to do tests on patients, (or anyone else for that matter), to do any tests without the patient's consent or knowledge. However, it could be argued that doing so saved the patients life in this case.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: House angrily points out that his team could've found the answer to Dan's problem sooner had his parents bothered to share the very crucial information that not only is he adopted, but his birth mother was never vaccinated against measles (which turned out to be the cause behind his numerous neurological symptoms).
- Crying Wolf: One of the clinic patients House encounters is a man who has a habit of suing doctors for malpractice for the pettiest of reasons. House was immediately able to deduct this given he drove 70 miles to Princeton for a minor infection any other doctor could've treated.
- Happily Adopted: The kid figured out he was adopted years ago. He doesn't care.
- Lying to Protect Your Feelings: Dan's parents never planned to tell him he's adopted to spare their son Adoption Angst.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Dan's birth mother was never vaccinated against measles. Because he had no defenses against the infection for the first six months of his life, the virus was able to camp out in his brain, eventually causing Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis.
