Hi
I hope I’m not spoiling anyone’s fun here as I am assuming anyone reading this would have already watched the episode but the end was blatantly obvious in that Cameron helped him die. House puts his hand on her shoulder and says: “I’m proud of you” while she is seen crying copiously. Now, why would that be?

“did Chase just say that he was moving from the Sigmoid colon into the Ascending colon? If so, where did the descending colon and transverse colon between them disappear to? ”

It’s three years after your comment, but I just re-watched the episode, an alarm went off at that same point, but for a different reason, and I came here to see if Dr. Scott or anyone else had caught it.

Foreman: “- scending colon is clean”. Hard to tell what the first syllable was, but the closed-captioning transcription reads, “descending”.

Chase: “Moving into the sigmoid… ”

Umm, did they stick the scope down the pt’s throat, through his stomach and small intestine, and then into the colon? It’s the only way you’d hit *any* of the Asc/Trverse/Desc before hitting the Sigmoid. I’m not a physician, but I don’t think that’s the way colonoscopies are done. ;) I *think* you stick the scope in the other end, and would go through the sigmoid before entering the descending.

Humongous goof, but perhaps no worse than the ones noted by Dr. Scott. But so easily avoidable. (sigh)

I think if Dr. Kevorkian had been less abrasive and House-like, we may have actually gotten somewhere in the debate in this country. It was an important debate to have and it is a shame that he wasn’t better able to champion his cause because I think that there are many people in this country whose end-time is made tortuous and they are made to feel like failures because they want to choose a gentler way out.

- I suffer from severe migraines. Often, the strongest pain killers do not touch the level of pain that I experience. The pain is enough to confuse me into thinking that I am suicidal… in my case, it really is a confusion, because I just want to be out of pain, and for me, the pain WILL eventually cease without medication and on its own (even if it takes days or weeks). Severe pain is unlike anything I can describe. In the moment, self-harm and suicide seem like nothing compared to the extreme torture of severe pain. For sufferers of acute severe pain, it is important that they are always “safe” during times of severe pain, as they are at extreme risk of suicide… severe pain IS torture. Imagine the worst possible physical things that could be done to you, and you will not come close to truly being able to empathize with severe pain unless you have felt such pain yourself.

- Knowing what severe pain is like, I can empathize with those who ARE in fatal situations who do not have much time left and do not have any hope of a cure or successful treatment left. And, like I said before… those of us who suffer from moderate to severe pain on an acute or chronic basis have a hard enough time trying to manage our pain, trying to find any sort of medication that will even take the edge off our pain, so that we can live any sort of a normal life… so for those who are actually being tortured to death, because that IS what is happened, they ARE being tortured to death, no, pain medication is not the answer. And yes, you CAN keep giving them morphine. You can keep giving them more and more morphine to try and stop their pain so that they can maybe, just maybe, not suffer while they die… and if you are suggesting that pain killers are the answer, well then this was the answer in that House episode, and the answer so often used in real life as well… in fact, often times, it’s not even intentional, no one is actively trying to “euthanize” anyone, they are just trying to keep the patient out of pain with morphine…

- So yeah… I just want to make it clear that it’s not a simple case of “why can’t they just keep the patient out of pain until he dies?” … because, it does not work that way at all. If there was a pain killer that could actually kill severe pain… I would be able to get my life back. Instead, I get to spend about 1/3 of my life being physically tortured in the most extreme way imaginable. But, I can deal with that because of a key word in the last sentence: “my life”. If for some reason a severe migraine hit that was different from the others, and it turned out to be caused by an inoperable brain tumor that didn’t respond to radiation… I would fight as long as the doctors told me I had even the slightest, the smallest probability of beating it… but, after that, I’d like to tell you that I’d hold onto life even while I was being brutally tortured and even though I knew the torture would continue until the moment that I died… I couldn’t say for sure that I would hold on until my last natural breath, because I am not in that head-place right now, and hopefully I never will be, and also I know what it feels like to want to escape severe pain because the torture is so brutal and so extreme. And if ANYONE tried to force me to continue living for weeks, days or even minutes in that state of constant physical torture… in my opinion, they would be as guilty for my horrendous pain as those who have personally tortured others are guilty of torture. Now, that is not to say that I would ever expect anyone to assist me in hurrying up my own death… but I would expect doctors to do everything they could to make sure that I was not in pain, including giving me as much morphine as I needed so that I could pass away peacefully as opposed to violently.

No, it wasn’t House.
No, it wasn’t Chase.
No, it wasn’t Foreman.

It was Cameron. And that’s why House was proud of her.

1. Morphine is not an anaesthetic agent. To maintain a patient in general anaesthesia (especially a gravely ill elderly patient) requires specialized expertise and constant monitoring, not a one-time dosing of an opiate.

2. Surely Dr. Powell had more than enough chemicals in his research lab to painlessly terminate his own life? The show began with him euthanizing a rat, and even while ill, he had sufficient motor function to administer a dose to himself. He wasn’t dependent on House for this (later on they refused to discharge him, though even then it seems unlikely no one of his family, friends, colleagues or acquaintances would agree to fetch for him some vial from his lab).