Tunnel Vision

I watched the final of series four of House M.D the night before last, and it was the first thing I watched on TV that genuinely made me cry.

Saddest moment in my television viewing time. Perfectly orchestrated, amazingly witty, beautiful cinematography, excellent mood music…

For those interested, I have supplied a complete synopsis with the help of IMDB. It’s not the same as seeing it, and not exactly essential for this story, but I wanted to give you a chance to experience it so I could share the gravity of the episode with you.

House was in a bus crash and split his head, which caused him to lose his short term memories, so he woke up with no memory of the event except that there was someone on the bus that was dying.

He went so far as to announce that a patient had meningitis so he could shut the emergency room down and check everyone. He quickly suspected the bus driver had a seizure, and the team began work on his case.
House looked at hospital security camera footage and any other clues he could find to trigger his memory. Kutner suggested medical hypnosis and Chase just so happened to have had some training back in Australia. The hypnosis sent House into a bizarre world of memory and hallucination that included seeing visions of Amber in a bar. Wilson was with House as he recalled these memories and House nearly told Wilson that he wanted to see Amber naked in his fantasy. After that, House saw some of passengers’ faces from the bus, including one of a mysterious woman who caught House’s eye. After misdiagnosing a Goth who’d been on the bus, House went back to the bus driver, who suffered sudden paralysis.
While conducting an MRI on House, Wilson asked him what he’d been hiding from his vision of Amber. House finally told Wilson it was that he wanted to see Amber naked, which didn’t surprise Wilson because House wants to see everyone naked. The fact that House didn’t objectify Amber in his fantasy made Wilson more uneasy, noting “This is bad.”
After frequent requests from Cuddy to go home and get some sleep, House then submerged himself in a sensory deprivation tank in yet another effort to recapture some memory. He slipped into a fantasy that included Cuddy doing a pole dancing strip-tease while they discussed possible diagnoses for the patient. The bus driver appeared in the hallucination, offering up some diagnoses of his own, and the mystery woman showed up again but House was yanked from his bath and sent home with a nurse and security guard. He continued to lead the team in treating the guy over the phone until Cuddy finally asked him to return to the hospital.
House noticed caps on the bus driver’s teeth and thought he might have had an air bubble enter his gums during recent dental work. He locked himself in the man’s hospital room with Thirteen while Cuddy, Foreman, Kutner and Taub watched helplessly. House wanted Thirteen to stab the guy’s heart to get the air bubble out, Cuddy shouting at Thirteen (Dr. Hadley) to stop, but she disobeyed, siding with House and jamming a syringe into the man’s chest and saving him.
Cuddy then went home with House, to make sure he finally got some rest and didn’t do anything stupid. She slept in the living room while he stayed in his room. But a middle-of-the-night dream brought the mystery woman back to House and gave him some clues to solving the real puzzle he had yet to figure out. She had a necklace charm, a red ribbon that he was meant to tie around her. As he did it, she said, "I’m cold," and House replied, "Stay with me," without knowing why. House woke up knowing that the mystery of the real person he was trying to save was still unresolved.
House then staged the scene inside the bus using nurses and doctors from the hospital to represent passengers. Meanwhile, he tossed back pills that are meant for Alzheimer’s patients to help charge up his brain. Cuddy and Wilson were worried the pills could make his brain go into overdrive and damage his heart. The scene went dark and House saw the mystery woman again. She told him she was providing clues to the real mystery. She kept holding her necklace made of a smooth yellow substance, asking “What is my necklace made out of? Who am I?” until House finally realised and admitted it was Amber who he had seen on the bus. He relived the crash and saw Amber tossed around in the bus. Then as the passengers came to, he noticed she had a metal pole lodged in her leg and tied a red scarf around her thigh to stem the blood. "I’m cold," she told him. "Stay with me," he said. The next thing he saw was a medic carrying Amber out of the bus.
When House’s memory had ended his heart had stopped from all the drugs he’d taken, and when he came to he said, "Amber." He told Wilson Amber was on the bus. Wilson realized he hadn’t spoken to her since the crash and Thirteen confirmed that "Jane Doe #2" had a birthmark on her right shoulder blade, as Amber does.

House and Wilson then located Amber at another hospital and Wilson pretended he was Amber’s husband so he could authorize Amber’s transfer to Princeton-Plainsboro. On the way to the hospital, Amber had a heart attack and Wilson suggested that they freeze Amber’s heart to give House more time to diagnose her.

With Amber in a stable condition the team went to work. The fact that her heart was slowed down made the diagnosis more difficult. House sent Kutner and Thirteen to Amber’s house to look for anything that might have made her sick, and Taub came to House alone to ask him what chance there was that he and Amber hooked up during the time they were together or done any drugs together. House didn’t answer, so Taub did the Tox screen, which was negative.
In his office, House had a dream of Amber walking in and she suggested maybe she’d always had a thing for him and he’d always had a thing for her. She poured him a glass of sherry and climbed onto his lap… then House woke up with a start. He wanted to unlock the real and complete memory from his brain by undergoing deep brain stimulation.
Amber’s liver was failing. House wondered about that sherry that Amber poured in his dream. It was a clue about which bar they’d been at the night before, Sharrie’s. House took Wilson there and the bartender tossed House the keys to his motorcycle as soon as he walked in the door. The bartender said that seemed like he was into the woman he was with at the bar. House had a flash of himself walking with his arm around Amber. Wilson was puzzled about the “seemed into her” line.
Back at the hospital, Thirteen’s job was being affected by her feelings about them treating Amber. Kutner told Thirteen he was 6 when his parents’ business was robbed and his mother and father shot dead. “Everyone dies,” he told Thirteen.
House was starting to let Wilson affect his treatment of Amber, much to the dismay of Foreman. He believed House was letting Wilson’s emotions get in the way of the treatment. He later went to Cuddy and told her that House was going to kill the patient. Cuddy and Foreman restarted her heart and damaged her brain in the process.
In a restroom meeting, House confronted Thirteen and suggested that she was torn up about Amber because she couldn’t stand watching a young doctor die because of her own fear that she was living with Huntington’s Disease and hadn’t been tested.
When House finally started making decisive calls about how Amber should be treated, Cuddy told Wilson to back off and let House do his job. He then asked House to do the deep brain stimulation, risking his life to save Amber’s. House agreed.

During the treatment House pieced together the night’s events. He remembered the bartender taking his keys because he’d had too much to drink. He asked to make a phone call and called Wilson’s house but Wilson was on call, and Amber answered. She agreed to pick House up from the bar, but he coaxed her into having one drink with him. House stumbled out of to bar to ride the bus home and left his cane. Amber found it and brought it to him on the bus. House recalled Amber sneezing, but it wasn’t as simple as the flu. It was the medicine she was taking for it. She had amantadine poisoning. As House spoke this out loud through his memory-vision Wilson reasoned that the crash destroyed Amber’s kidneys, which took away her ability to process the drugs. But House told him the amantadine binds with proteins and dialysis couldn’t clear it out of her bloodstream. “There’s nothing we can do.” he told Wilson. House’s memory led up to the moment of the crash, whereupon the experience of reliving it was too much and he had a seizure, which resulted in a coma.
Once it was clear that Amber was going to die, Cuddy suggested to Wilson that they wake her up so he could have a few more hours with her. Wilson broke down, fighting the fact that it was cruel to wake her up to tell her she was going to die in a few hours, but wanting to spend the last moments with her and tell her that he loved her. When Amber awoke, he explained to her what happened and she understood that she was going to die. She said she shouldn’t have gotten on the bus. Wilson told her it wasn’t her fault. Under the advice of Thirteen the whole team visited Amber and said a series of poignant wordless goodbyes. In the final stages Wilson lay on Ambers bed, hugging her, crying, asking “Why aren’t you angry?”, she replied “Because that’s not the last emotion I want to feel.” Wilson and Amber shared a lingering kiss and Wilson switched off her life support. With a sigh Amber passed away in his arms.
Back in House’s room, House was unconscious, in his mind he was on a big white bus with Amber. They both seemed to realise that this was a limbo of some sort. House told Amber he should have been the one who was dead. He was afraid Wilson was going to hate him, and Amber told him he kind of deserves it. House suggested that he wanted to stay dead with Amber and didn’t want to get off the bus “because it doesn’t hurt here. I don’t want to be in pain, I don’t want to be miserable. I don’t want him to hate me.” Amber told him he can’t always get what he wants. House got up and walked out of his dream, waking up in his hospital bed with Cuddy next to him.
Meanwhile, Thirteen pulled her test results for Huntington’s out of the machine, which she had taken after House confronted her about it, and saw that they were positive. Taub rolled into bed with his wife. Kutner ate cereal while watching TV. Foreman met up with Chase and Cameron at a bar. Wilson went to House’s room and stood outside, meeting eyes with House briefly before walking away. When he returned home he lay down in bed, and found a note Amber left under her pillow it read “Sorry I’m not here. Went to pick up House.”

I was incredibly moved. The fact that Wilson could only spend those hours with her to tell her that she was going to die was just heart wrenching.

So after watching this heartbreaking episode I went off to bed and to charge my phone, as I had been, and still was, texting a friend. And I have a desk light in my room, since my top light blew the lighting circuitry of the whole house and hasn’t been fixed since. And this desk light had been chewed by my pet rabbit ages ago near the base of the plug where the cord joins; so there is a small patch where the insulation is missing. This was bound up securely with electrical tape, but after years of wear and movement and the more frequent use since might light blew, the tape had migrated down the cord. This, of course I did not notice as I plugged my 2 inch wide charger transformer into the next power point, accidentally touching and making perfect contact with the cluster of copper wires protruding from the light’s power cord. It stung like hell, and I drew my hand back in shock and pain, the words of my mother running through my head “It’s not the volts that kill you, it’s the amps.” Under the influence of this moving and scary episode of House, I realised I had almost died. 240 volts, 10 amps straight through my body, lucky I wasn’t making enough contact for it to be fatal. I could have been lying on my back on the carpet dead before I could raise the alarm. Suddenly the text message conversation I was having seemed to trivial, everything was surreal. I did not sleep well that night, and the following day was so fucking serious and sad. I started considering everything I’d been talking about regarding my aspirations anew. I wondered what I had been doing with my life, why was I here? At all, and why specifically at this situation, location and point in time. I fell asleep on the bus thinking about it and woke up to the radio playing that song which goes “The angel closes her eyes… pale blue coloured eyes. Oh I feel it comin’ back again, like a roll of thunder chasing the wind…” and nearly cried. This turn of events really freaked me out and put a lot of things in perspective.

I think once again that things might be working out. With the city and things. There was a bit of a bright patch where it all seemed to fall into place really simply, but further research killed another scheme. The whole arrangement is just a little iffy; things would be fine if it were completely impossible, or actually worked, but just like my singing it’s only just not right. It seems so maddeningly like it’s just a matter of putting the pieces of the puzzle in the right place.

I’m going to a party with all my guy friends this weekend, tomorrow. Another roaring computer party, to soak up the YouTube and general internet and gaming culture. Should be fun if I ever get this packed away. Cooked two dinners tonight, I should have taken a photo of the marvellous spread of ingredients I had all chopped and prepared. Unfortunately my mother was not feeling up to cooking, and it had got too late waiting for her to do so; so I had to pack it all away without getting dinner, clean it all up, help her to bed and bring her a snack to sustain herself with. The less said the more said, if you know what I mean? Don’t misunderstand, she fully ‘with it’, it’s just more like two real people than a parent and a kid. Like an older and younger sibling. Sometimes it’s nice to be the carer, instead of the cared-for; I say to my friends “Did I miss the memo telling me that I’m the parent and she’s the child?” but deep down I like the fact that I am capable of helping. Even if she thinks that my attitude prevents me from doing anything predominately unselfish. I know this is breaking the rules with what I said about her being able to read this, as tactful as I am trying to be. Is it that unfair? Am I being that mean? Or have my views really become that shaped by my upbringing? I know there is always a moment in your life where you realise that your parents and their views are not the be all and end all about the world, it usually occurs right before the more impulsive young adult moves out. And if your parents are honest enough to tell you or let it show, they always have problems with their parents and the way they did things. There is a time when you stop using your parents as the standard moral compass for everything. And I think it must be harder, and done with more regret, when you realise that it is happening.

I just cannot believe the amount of people that have built their blogs (Marieke Hardy), their comedy careers (Judith Lucy) or their reputations as a directors (Richard E. Grant) by bitching about their parents. And you would not believe the amount of time I spent trying to remember the name “Richard E. Grant”. I knew everything else about him; he’s male, spent a lot of time in both Britain and Africa one way or another, his mother was depressed, his father was an alcoholic, he made a movie about it based on his diaries, he was interviewed by Andrew Denton, his name has an E in it… but I couldn’t remember his name; and I of course became obsessed with thinking of the name just because I couldn’t. But there it is, all for that rather insignificant sentence.

And now, after that inspiration depleting exercise, I am afraid I cannot think of anything to finish this much belated blog. And only because I remember myself saying it for no reason at all in a dream – ciao!

☆Anika☆