I’m going to be really honest here. Up until 30 minutes into the episode, I thought tonight was going to suck like last week did. I really did. But what do you know, they still got that plot twist thing and managed to make an otherwise boring episode into something cool.
‘Unplanned Parenthood’presented the story of a woman who decided to have a baby on her own, after her firstborn was already grown up. Apparently she had been such a bad parent to her first daughter that she thought she needed to give motherhood another shot. So she found a sperm donor, got herself pregnant and had a beautiful baby girl. Except the child wasn’t as healthy as she hoped she would be and was born with what seemed to be a hepatic issue. Long story short, what they thought was an abscess in her liver was actually cancer — melanoma, in fact.
Now, how can a newborn have cancer, you ask? Melanoma, even, when she hadn’t even been exposed to the sun. Well, that’s when things got interesting.
They decided to transfuse her and gave her her mother’s blood, which miraculously made her better. But that just didn’t make any sense because if the kid had melanoma, then mom has it too, correct? And if mom has it too, how can mom’s blood make her child better? It just doesn’t add up. After further examining her, they discovered that not only mom had melanoma, but she also had lung cancer. Talk about bad luck.
Turns out that the antibodies created by the lung tumor were fighting the melanoma, which was why, when the little girl got mom’s blood, she immediately responded. So now that everything is figured out, they have two choices: operate and get mom’s tumor out and start the baby on chemotherapy, which could give her brain damage and development problems down the road; or keep transfusing mom’s blood into baby until the melanoma is gone and then take mom’s tumor out. Except by the time they wipe out the melanoma, mom’s blood could throw a clot, which could kill her.
Mom obviously chooses the latter because she doesn’t want to see her child suffer. Not even 24 hours later, she dies while giving blood to her baby girl. A clot caused a pulmonary embolism, which killed her almost instantly. Her older daughter, who had severe issues with her mother before, is left with a newborn little sister to raise all by herself.
It was a really touching case and it finally held my attention, unlike previous episodes.
The other two stories were that House told Taub to hire a female doctor, which he does, but is so scared of House that the doctor — Lanie from Gilmore Girls! — gives up the job by the end of the episode. Boring.
On another note, Cuddy asked House to babysit Rachel, which he reluctantly agrees. He invites Wilson over and tries to leave him with the kid and, while they’re arguing, Rachel swallows a dime. They spend the entire episode trying to figure out how to get it of her without Cuddy finding out. It was pure comic relief. Too bad it was only slightly amusing.
I give this episode a B- for effort. At least they presented an interesting case. Better than the train wreck from last week.
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