User:CasaCurtis/sandbox

The episode of House “Autopsy” is not necessarily about the dissection of a dead person. In fact, it’s very much about a person struggling to stay alive. The episode starts off simply with a young girl, named Andie, who is a cancer patient. She’s in her bathroom singing to a song and seems generally very happy, as she’s about to take some medication, however, Andie starts hallucinating violently, causing her to break her mirror.

“Autopsy” has an abrupt beginning – from liveliness to deep illness. Dr. Wilson and House are walking and Wilson describes that Andie is diagnosed with Alveolar Rhabdomyosarcoma, a subtype of the rhabdomyosarcoma family of soft tissue tumors. House isn’t interested until Dr. Wilson mentions that Andie’s cancer isn’t in the brain, and isn’t connected to her hallucinations. Later then, when the team is doing their differential diagnostics, they explain that this girl has had 5 major surgeries, a bone marrow transplant, and 14 rounds of chemotherapy. The team’s diagnostics come up with possibly after effects of chemo, just genetics, and graphed vs. host rejection from the bone marrow transplant. House simply suggests she’s making all of this drama up because she broke a mirror, but obviously that’s not the case. Andie goes through many different MRI’s, blood, and other tests. They spot that her oxygen saturation level is low by a very small percent. House presents the team Andie’s echocardiogram, and they find something wrong with her arterial heart valve. They perform a small surgery on her heart and find a tumor growing alongside the heart wall and in her lung. Dr. Wilson describes it to Andie’s mom, as an octopus around a fist, if they remove the tumor, there might not be much heart left. A blood clot in the brain is believed to be the source cause of the hallucination. House plans to perform what’s called therapeutic hypothermia. Essentially that is a deliberate deduction of the body’s core temperature to about 21 degrees Celsius. This essentially leaves Andie clinically dead. Then they plan to extract two liters of blood, and then when they replace it, they have an MRI running to find out exactly where the blood clot in the brain is. This scene is tense because they can only have Andie at such a low temperature for a minute before there’s permanent body damage. Foreman spots the blood clot for a brief second and they bring her back to life, the clot is slowly removed and that allows for Andie to walk out the hospital. The episode ends with House looking at motorcycles and he test-drives one, on an empty road.