Poison (House)

House (TV series) episode
episode_name = Poison
episode_no = HOU-108
airdate = January 25, 2005
writer = Matt Witten
director = Guy Ferland


season = 1
diagnosis = Phosmet poisoning

Poison is the eighth episode of the first season of "House", which premiered on the FOX network on January 25, 2005. House and his team investigate the mysterious poisoning of high-school student Matt Davis but another teen is brought in with all of the same symptoms but almost nothing else in common with Matt.

Plot

A student named Matt begins sweating and grimacing during an AP Calculus exam. He stands up, passes out and goes into convulsions.

Matt has severe bradycardia, which means that his heart rate is falling fast. Foreman presents the case to House who thinks it is simply drug use. While Chase examines the boy, he begins seizing.

On House’s orders, Foreman and Cameron inspect Matt’s home for signs of drug use. They turn up nothing, but Cameron does find a jar of tomato sauce with the lid popped which could indicate a bacterial infection. House says the seizures rule out food-borne toxins, or drug use as Foreman points out, and so the team suspects some sort of poison.

Chase informs Matt’s mother that the blood work is conclusive that an organophosphate is causing Matt’s trouble. Matt is hooked up to an IV of pralidoxime. Suddenly, Matt’s heart rate plummets.

The team is stumped leading Foreman to mention an experimental treatment that could work, but they need to know the exact poison in order to give the exact poison hydrolase. Foreman and Cameron go back to Matt's house to see what kind of pesticides might be used on the tomato garden he keeps. Cameron finds an empty can of disulfoton, a garden pesticide, so Chase prepares an injection of disulfoton hydrolase. Matt’s mother, however, insists he only used orange peel oil on the garden. He dumped the disulfoton because he couldn’t use pesticides in his environmental science class. Since the hydrolase would increase the toxicity if they’re wrong, Matt's mother begs Chase not to inject her son.

Cuddy tells House that he will need to get the mother to sign off on rejection of the treatment. He changes the legal language to be slightly more condescending when reading it to her. The mother changes her position but before they can start Matt on the hydrolase another patient named Chi is admitted with identical symptoms. Although the two have never had any contact, they do go to the same school.

Chase and Cameron inspect the school bus that Matt and Chi both rode that morning. The driver tells them that he noticed a truck spraying near a pond on the bus's route. The county had been spraying ethyl-parathion to fight West Nile virus and there is a hydrolase for that, but Matt’s mother again refuses treatment until she hears from the Center for Disease Control. Cameron is sent in to talk to her but she still refuses until an angry Cameron lays it out for her, causing her to finally relent.

The team administers the hydrolase. Later, both boys go into convulsions, the doctors save them, but the boys are left in terrible shape. Ethyl-parathion is dismissed as the poison and so Foreman and Cameron head out on another inspection in order to discover any potential poisons shared by the boys. They find a 128-ounce bottle of TKO detergent in each house but Chi’s mother insists her son wore all-new clothes that day that had never been washed. House and Chase salvage Chi’s and Matt’s clothes from storage and run tests on them, which test positive for phosdrin (CAS 7786-34-7).

Matt’s mother again rejects treatment until she hears from the CDC. House visits her once again but instead of merely talking, he decides to just sit in the room with the medicine to put pressure on Matt's mother. As House predicted, the CDC claims they can’t diagnose Matt simply by records and would not be able to visit Matt in time. The mother agrees to the third hydrolase and the third time is indeed a charm as Matt and Chi both recover. It then turns out that Chase had called Matt's mother using a fake accent to tell her that the CDC could not help.

Foreman learns that somebody was selling pants out of the back of his truck while their second job was at a cornfield. Some pesticide was spilled on the pants, which were then not washed. Matt's mother tells House that she received "another" call from the CDC, before telling her now recovered son that "they [House and Foreman] are the arrogant jerks that saved your life."

References

When the patient's mother insists on waiting for a second opinion from the CDC, Wilson says, "Godot would be faster." That's a reference to the play Waiting for Godot, about two people who spend a long time waiting for someone named Godot, who never arrives.

External links

* [http://www.fox.com/house/ FOX.com-"House" official site]
* [http://televisionwithoutpity.com/show.cgi?show=151/ Television Without Pity-"House" recaps]
* [http://epguides.com/House/ House Episode Guide at epguides.com]
* [http://www.tvguide.com/tvshows/house/100213/ TVGuide's Page: Full list of House Episodes]
* [http://www.housemd-guide.com/ House M.D. Guide]