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Episode 3: 97 Seconds

Aired 10/9/07

Thomas Stark, a young man in a power wheelchair, and his English Shepard service dog, Hoover, exit a minivan. Stark begins to motor himself across the street when he suddenly loses consciousness. Hoover reacts as cars approach. A driver that is changing her radio station dial is unaware of the impending crash. She hits the breaks just in time. The woman runs out to check on the young man slouched in his wheelchair in the middle of the road.

At Princeton-Plainsboro, House arrives in the lecture hall to describe Thomas Stark’s condition to the remaining Fellows. He wants to split the candidates into two teams to investigate the condition. Twin 15B suggests women be pitted against men. Amber asks to be on the men’s team to increase her chances of being selected. Yet the guys resist because they hate her. The men and women discuss options for diagnosis. Kutner suggests that the patient’s recent trip to Thailand had something to do with his illness.

Amber approaches Cameron in the ER to get her help on the case. House attends to Mark Allmore, a young man who is bruised from a car accident. Suddenly, Allmore pulls out a knife and sticks it into an electrical socket, electrocuting himself.

Thirteen believes that Stark picked up a thread worm called Strongyloides while in Thailand. She gives him a cup with two pills and he asks for some water. Kutner and Brennan enter the room to perform tests on Stark. They carry him to the bathroom to collect samples. Cuddy asks House what is wrong with Stark. He really does not know.

House obsesses with Wilson about the man who shocked himself. House plays with the knife Allmore used.

Amber walks into the men’s team but she is unwelcome. She offers information from Cameron in exchange for entry onto their squad and they agree. Amber administers a test on Stark that involves a jar of bugs biting him. He starts to choke.

The Fellows and House discuss the new development. Thirteen insists that Stark has Spinal Muscular Atrophy and Strongyloides worms. Twin 15A thinks they need to stress Stark’s system. House penalizes the men with detention for only performing tests while the women actually tried to heal Stark.

Allmore tells House that he wasn’t trying to kill himself. He was only trying to re-experience the bliss of the 97 seconds he was technically dead caused by a car crash.

Amber and the men’s team deduce that a tumor in Stark’s neck could be the trouble. She sneaks out and finds Stark on a tilt table, where his vitals remain stable despite being swung like a human see-saw.

House has decorated the lecture hall like a tribal council. Amber enters holding a CT film that House dismisses. She then hounds Chase in the operating room to look at the scan. She convinces him to run a blood test on Stark for her. Amber takes the blood from Stark. It is the color green -- which is the unprocessed dye from the CT test. His kidneys are failing.

House is stumped. He was sure that Thirteen’s diagnosis of Strongyloides was correct. Amber stands by her theory of scleroderma. When he finds out that Chase helped Amber, House confronts Chase in front of the Fellows. House believes Stark really has cancer.

At Mercy Hospital, Forman is trying to diagnose a case with a team of his own but he is struggling. He’s accustomed to thinking “outside-the-box,” and he cannot find common ground with Schaffer, his new “play–it-safe” supervisor. Foreman comes to a decision about what to do. He pushes his patient’s bed in the hallway, literally taking things into his own hands.

Back at Princeton-Plainsboro, House wants to remove Stark’s eye because he believes this is the source of the cancer. This enrages Cuddy. Stark refuses the surgery. He does not want to live if it means not walking, not eating and now not seeing. House belittles Stark’s belief in the beyond to Wilson. Misery, he says, it better than nothing. House contemplates death and the afterlife in his office. He plays with Allmore’s knife and stares longingly at an electrical socket.

Amber and Thirteen attend to Stark’s lungs. He can barely breathe, and the liquid removed from his lungs is clear, not bloody. If he had cancer, there would be blood.

Amber is paged by House and she finds him lying unconscious on his office floor from electric shock. House wakes up in the same room as Allmore. Wilson takes over leadership of the Fellows.

Wilson lets House know that Allmore just passed away and that Stark probably has Eosinophilic pneumonia rather than cancer. Wilson prescribes House some extra pain meds. This, of course, pleases House.

Stark is near death. The Fellows assure him that the new medicine will work. He asks for his faithful service dog, Hoover.

After Stark dies, Amber brings the news to House and asks why he summoned her with the page. He explains that, if he died, she’d never get the job. He knew she wouldn’t let that occur.

When they get to Stark’s room, Hoover the dog is also dead. House asks Thirteen if she actually witnessed the patient take the pills for thread worm. She hesitates. The medicine is fatal for dogs like Hoover with the MDR1 gene. House finds the empty pill cup on the floor. There are dog teeth marks on it.

At Mercy, Foreman’s unorthodox treatment works for his patient. Yet his supervisor Schaffer is unhappy. She does not tolerate bending of any rules. Schaffer fires Foreman on the spot.

House meets with Thirteen. Her initial diagnosis was correct -- Stark would have lived had he taken the pills. She begs to be spared the lecture and for him to just fire her. Yet House is giving the lecture because he is not firing her. He knows Thirteen will never let something like this happen ever again.

- From Fox.com