My 13-y-o son has become a “House” addict and, therefore, an expert.
Whenever a patient starts groaning or clutching his/her stomach, I always turn to my son and say eagerly, “Do you think s/he is gonna vomit blood?”
My son invariably rolls his eyes and tells me, “Mom, on ‘House,’ no one ever vomits blood when there is some kind of warning [stomach pain, etc.], and no one ever vomits blood IN the hospital.”
Can someone please cite some episodes that prove his assertion wrong? (I realize no teenager will ever admit to being wrong, but it would be a moral victory for me, nonetheless.)
Well, I don’t know if my dad did it in the hospital, but he did have stomach pain at home (persistently, for weeks) and he did vomit blood. Poo’ed it, too. Bleeding ulcer.
We only discovered “House” recently, mostly through “House” marathons on USA, so we must have hit a string of episodes that included a fair amount vomiting (of blood or normal stomach contents.)
In fact, we are watching “House” right now – the “Son of a Coma Guy” episode – and the son, in the hospital, complained of nausea and started spewing blood. I turned to my son and said, “AHA! You’re wrong!” He said, “Mom, that was coughing blood, not vomiting.”
Zsofia, I’m sorry you went through that. Real life sucks.
On House, I’ve seen vomiting, pooping, vomiting poop (really an unpleasant thought) and an MD being splattered with shit from an old man’s exploding corpse. Fun stuff. And definitely vomiting blood, usually without warning – but I can’t remember if it ever happened in the hospital.
There was a woman who had killed her baby who started vomiting blood when Dr. Chase told her her baby had died. That was in the hospital.
(Due to some kind of something, she had no memory of killing the baby.)
When the magician/escape artist lost consciousness and almost drowned. It turned out, in the end to be lupus
Personally, I lost faith in House after the ergotamine case. They got almost all of the symptoms wrong. Plus, ergotamine poisoning was successfully diagnosed centuries ago when physicians still believed in humors. A team of doctors with modern equipment should have no problem diagnosing it.
I definitely remember one instance where someone, already House’s patient and in the hospital, just leaned over and vomited blood. No warning. I think the patient was male, but that’s all I got.
Or like last episode’s lead poisoning. Everyone who sticks their nose in a hospital gets a CBC, and part of a CBC is usually a differential, and lead poisoning shows up as really cool basophilic stippling in the RBCs of a differential. In other words, it gets caught real quick. But you can catch a lot of conditions with the CBC and diff, so I guess that wouldn’t make dramatic television.
Patient vomits blood in “Ugly”, the episode you were discussing earlier (Taub calls it ‘vomited blood’ when he talks to the kid’s dad about it), and in “No More Mr. Nice Guy”, Season 4 Episode 13. That’s the one where “NICE” is a symptom and House fakes Syphilis.
