Comments on: House – Episode 13 (Season Three): “Needle in a Haystack”

By: Mortimer

Mortimer — Sun, 08 May 2011 09:51:45 +0000

@Sean: Seems like we’re the only two chaps on here who noticed Stevie’s spleen dislocation… That added to the non-existent diaphragm or mesentery, the anatomy in this episode was inexplicably bad.

By: John P. G.

John P. G. — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 03:58:17 +0000

Sorry, I meant nobody (learns) the lessons.

By: John P. G.

John P. G. — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 03:56:45 +0000

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but I found the fact that Cuddy changed House’s parking space (to begin with, not at the end of the episode), regardless of her reasons, to be extremely stupid. After House’s reaction to the carpet incident in Lines In The Sand, Cuddy really should know better than to change anything without House’s O.K. I suppose this counts as one of the times that nobody the lessons of the previous episodes.

By: Snowbear

Snowbear — Mon, 17 May 2010 23:58:35 +0000

Yeah, the intestine thing really bothered me. I don’t know enough medicine that everything else in the episode slid by me, but you only need to do one animal dissection in high school to know the intestines aren’t just sitting inside you. That really ruined the episode for me. Though most of their internal organs in the operating room shots are hard to believe. Is the procedure House was doing based on any real procedures?

By: Irene Adler

Irene Adler — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:00:44 +0000

If I remeber correctly Forman’s girlfriend (the nurse) shows up in the following episode, so she wasn’t just created for the sole purpose of one episode after all.

By: Elisa

Elisa — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 22:38:56 +0000

I don’t know about the GI tract, but I can personally attest that a piece of wood that has been lodged in the tissues around a joint for a while does not “stand out clearly” in the least. Three MRIs and five doctors, and one of them noticed a shadow that she said “looked a little wierd” and which was almost certainly nothing, but had drawn her attention because it was associated with the location of a particular scar. (I couldn’t see anything, but then, I don’t have a medical degree.)

By: GDG

GDG — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:37:43 +0000

Breathing the toothpick directly into lungs is hard.
However, after the known story of the *fir branch* in patient’s lungs:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/5152953/Surgeons-find-fir-tree-growing-inside-patients-lung.html

It is believable! :)

By: Mei

Mei — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:36:30 +0000

Very late but I wanted to agree with Soraya that the patient being Roma was a cheap way to try and make the patient special, and was terribly insulting to the Romani people in general.

Now, I’ll admit, I’m not very knowledgeable about the Rom, but I do know that the way the outsider paranoia was treated as being something that causes ignorance of things like medicine and learning was VERY overplayed, and certainly insulting, but the way they treated his girlfriend wasn’t out of line. Many parent’s hate their kids boy/girlfriends on principle, and the fact she was Gajo to boot make it worse.

Really, they shouldn’t have gone for the Romani angle on this, it came out as a terrible stereotyping piece they should have left out.

By: Soraya

Soraya — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:05:19 +0000

Scrolling through the very interesting discussions concerning medical and psychoanalytical issues in this episode and felt I had to note two things that I guess are minor but kinda concern me (well as much as TV show should).

1: Most of the people who House sees are fairly critical, therefore most of the time in ICU. I’m a regular medical nurse, and I freak everytime they go into an arrest and its the doctors or patient themselves that have to shout out to the apparently deaf or missing nurses to save their life when every second matters. Where’s the nurses watching telemetry? I know the writers want to limit the extras but there’s a difference between missing specialists (for the tests) and a fairly deserted ward.

2. I found my knowledge of Romani people lacking so I did some preliminary readings and found their culture a little hard to digest (from an outsider’s point of view) that considering their history and distrust of outside cultures, as well as their influence on the patient that he was even allowed to stay in the hospital. From what I could see, they were tampering with the rules such as having their entire family in a hospital room (in Australia, usually limit to 2-3 unless its a special time, like death watch) and contaminating his diet especially since he’s just had surgery in the digestive system. There would have been a bit of upset if the family was asked to leave and in the end, would have taken him home, dispite his conditions. If their judgement was altered by their culture to the point where they could blame an outsider girl for the patient swallowing a toothpick (while the father is chewing on one at the same time!), I can’t imagine its much further to simply go discharge him AMA.

Sorry I ramble, but my question is, is this brief picture into this culture even slightly accurate or did the writers chuck in that tiny segway to add some slight controversy into the mix? It’s not like its only the gypsy’s that use toothpicks!

By: Karsan Nakliyat

Karsan Nakliyat — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 20:03:22 +0000

If it punctured the esophagus to enter a lung, that would have caused massive GI bleeding (sort of a Mallory-Weiss tear) and pneumonia from having something unsterile and and unsterile GI tract exposed into lung tissue…