Wow - I thought the ending was great, having the girl say “House!”
What I don’t get, and please correct my total ignorance as I have no experience here, is why the mother’s placenta didn’t have the same life-saving blood that her body did? IOW, why would the baby be born instantly unhealthy like that if it was being fed the mother’s healthy blood in the womb?
Polite Dissent has the same issue about the antibodies treating the baby.
Also, does anyone understand the title “Unplanned Parenthood”? The baby was planned because a sperm donor was used. Or does it mean how the sister became a parent at the end and she didn’t plan for that?
@ cochrane
Thanks, that’s pretty much what I expected; I just wanted to make sure.
This was more or less my thought on it too. House is a genius when it comes to medicine and even when it comes to manipulating people. But that doesn’t mean he necessarily knows what a dime is made out of. I don’t think it’s too unreasonable that he just sort of assumed “metal = magnetic”, especially given some of the other stretches we’ve had to believe.
House became an unplanned parent when he was forced to babysit, and moreso a play on the unplanned part of being a parent when when Rachael swallowed the dime. The sister became an unplanned parent at the end too. It seems rather fitting to me.
My only issue with the metal != magenetic thing was remembering back to an earlier episode where a kid had swallowed something metal and was about to be wheeled into emergancy surgery - House grabbed the metal detector wand thingy from a nearby gaurd to tell where the item was and that surgery wouldn’t be needed.
My bigger issue with it was all the angst over a dime - arguably the smallest of American coins - was it really as big a deal as they were making over it? (other than the obvious humor issues with Cuddy and watching the kid, etc).
Hell, I swallowed the ball to our Mousetrap game and nobody cared that much. Although one of my brothers had to go through my poop until he found it.
That was 36 years ago, and he brought it up again last week.
I loved that too. Kids that age are so…honest.
I don’t think he was thinking to clearly to begin with. House also wouldn’t have needed to ask the pediatrician what to do to get the dime out, and he REALLY wouldn’t have needed to ask things like how much time he has before there’s a problem.
Metal detectors don’t care whether an object is magnetic, something only has to be electrically conductive to be detected.
I was, granted, an new and ignorant parent, but it was my experience once I heard babbling, the kid was NOT going to just roll over and go back to sleep. It meant “I’m up now, and you’d better be getting up, too, or else you will think, in a few minutues, that an air-raid siren is going off in the other room”.
I’m losing a lot of love for House that has nothing to do with Huddy. Too many elements have been repeated on the show from the show itself or other shows. Nothing is feeling original. And so much is predictable. I knew the POTW was going to die because it seems only mothers and kids die. Very rarely do men die. It just seems to go for the low-hanging fruit to tug at our heartstrings for the new mothers/pregnant women/children.
I did mention giving the mother a fresh supply of blood.
You would get more viable blood from the mother while she was alive than you could harvest PM. Routinely, severely injured patients in surgery have their blood replaced more than once during an operation. For cardiac surgery the patients blood is often cycled through machinery during the op. It would be a simple matter to take the mother’s blood and replace it all with suitable donor blood.
Ah, but the donor blood wouldn’t have Teh Magic in it, would it? So as you replace more and more of the mother’s blood the precious antibodies will become more and more diluted.
I wouldn’t have gotten up for a little babbling, but I also wouldn’t have used a baby monitor for a 2-yr-old. In my experience, a 2-yr-old gets out of bed and comes to get you, anyway.
The Polite Dissent guy says that once the dime was past the ileocecal valve, the danger was past. So that ultrasound should have been good news.
It’s okay because the mother would soon be undergoing chemotherapy. So I like this idea… drain all the antibodies out of the mom, use it on the baby so it can avoid chemo.
You just need to setup a machine to drain all the good stuff out while replacing the mom’s plasma with either her own filtered blood or donated plasma / blood.
Agreed. I have a two year old niece. The little girl was 3 or 4, IMO. And there’s no way that a 2-year old would have connected swallowing the dime to House.
Also agree that swallowing a dime would be no big deal and I’m a certified mom.
Finally, there’s no way that Wilson would agree to do a “risky” medical procedure on a child without getting consent from her parents. Especially his boss’ daughter. House, yes. Wilson, no.
Good news medically, yes, but House also didn’t want Cuddy to know that he’d been inattentive while babysitting. So the kid passing the dime and Cuddy finding it still gets him in trouble.
I liked the episode. My brother really liked the ending because he said that When Cuddy saw the dime in the diaper and wondered aloud where that came from, the baby said “House.”
I didn’t catch that, if it happened. I still have it recorded so I’ll have go back and watch it. Did anyone catch that? Because that would be a very good ending.
My son is 2 this week and we haven’t needed a baby monitor for ages. He’s loud enough that if he cries, we can definitely hear it.
Also, if Rachel was capable of getting up and going downstairs and asking House for juice, she’s more than capable of going to money’s room and waking up mommy by lifting an eyelid. Edited to add: There is no way in hell that child is two years old. She is way to big. She is also way too quiet to be a two year old.
Yes, it did happen.
I really liked the game of chicken between Wilson and House outside of Cuddy’s house.
“You won’t leave”
“Yes I will”
“No you won’t”
I half expected them to pull away in opposite directions, both sure that the other would immediately return, resulting in the child being alone for the evening and God knows what happening.