Tuesday

Apr. 24th, 2012 12:44 pm
nightdog_barks: (Wilson in Half)
[personal profile] nightdog_barks
Okay, so let's get this out of the way right off the bat ...



Yes, I agree that Wilson is panicking and acting irrationally. Cancer is never something to not take seriously, but from everything I've read so far, Stage II thymoma, if operable, has a good success rate and often doesn't even require chemo. The idea that he wants to stay out of the hospital and try this SUPER DANGEROUS experimental drug (I'm assuming it's experimental, since drug companies generally don't want to license medicines that will kill half their patients) is ... odd, to say the least.

But here's the thing (and I want to emphasize I'm only speaking for myself here). When you receive a diagnosis of cancer, many people DO jump to the worst-case scenario first. We ask ourselves, what are all the bad things that can happen? Oh my god, if they could happen, that means they might happen! It's like the sequence in Woody Allen's wonderfully humane movie Hannah and Her Sisters, where because Allen's character has a small hearing loss, he blows it up into believing he has a malignant brain tumor, and constructs an entire narrative of despair and loss around it. Wilson's an oncologist, so he's already seen the absolute worst that can happen -- to other people. Now it may be happening to him, and what happens? He panics, and behaves irrationally. Just like many real people do, every day.

So. It's also possible he has a very good reason to panic (besides human nature, I mean). There seems to be a connection between thymoma and myasthenia gravis, but it's hard to tell from the literature which comes first (chicken and egg syndrome, also known as cart-before-the-horse disease). But that may be what Wilson's real concern is -- that he'll develop MG, or he's already showing symptoms that he thinks are related to MG. If he does have both, the prognosis is not as good as for thymoma alone, and he's seriously afraid that he will, as he said, "wither away in a hospital bed."

What I know in the end is that there's a lot we don't know. Is it just a thymoma? Have they done a biopsy? They say it's Stage II now, but staging can and does often change after a biopsy. How did they find it? Thymomas are usually discovered after a routine chest X-ray-- was Wilson having a chest X-ray, and if so, why?

What I think is that things will get weirder, not saner, towards the end. I mean, this is a show that last night seriously presented the possibility of a patient levitating. I think we're going to see more spooky, inexplicable-by-logic incidents, and hey, maybe when Kutner shows up, it's not a dream sequence or a hallucination.

I'm gonna go with the words of Walt Whitman on this one:

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and
children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward ... and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.




TL;DR, I think there are mysteries yet to come, and if the worst happens, it'll happen, but it still won't be what we expect.

So. Beautiful and sunny here, probably need to run some errands but we'll see. Tomatoes are doing well although we lost some of the ripening cherry tomatoes to a caterpillar. Grrrr. Also need to clean up and tweak the fic I finished and send it to my First Readers.

And ... onward.

Date: 2012-04-24 05:57 pm (UTC)
taiga13: (Justified)
From: [personal profile] taiga13
Great analysis! I was surprised that the levitating thing wasn't explained, like "death cat" was - that we were really left wondering if there was a scientific explanation. Usually they're insistent, often overly so, on showing the man behind the curtain. Maybe Wilson will die and House will start seeing and hearing him, and it won't be a hallucination.
I can understand Wilson panicking considering all the people he's watched die, but I'm surprised that a) he's acting THAT irrationally and most of all b) that House isn't forcibly stopping him. He's fully capable of handcuffing his best friend to a hospital bed, so why isn't he? I'm actually hoping we do learn it's worse than it sounds so that the behaviour we saw in the promo, from both of them, makes more sense.
Or maybe we'll find out the drugs he's giving Wilson aren't the super dangerous ones Wilson thinks he's getting, but the safer standard treatment?
It's turned lovely here now, we were actually hot yesterday!

Date: 2012-04-24 06:23 pm (UTC)
deelaundry: man reading in an airport with his face hidden by the book (Default)
From: [personal profile] deelaundry
The levitating thing wasn't explained but it was explained. We weren't told specifically how it happened, but House showed that it was a trick by levitating himself.

Date: 2012-04-24 06:45 pm (UTC)
taiga13: by indigo_art (Wilson's face in hands pose)
From: [personal profile] taiga13
He did? Shoot, I missed it!

Date: 2012-04-24 06:15 pm (UTC)
felis: (Hugh dark LTT)
From: [personal profile] felis
Sorry to bother you, it seems like I'm the only person here who doesn't like spoilers anyway, but hardly any of what you wrote is actually about last night. I'll know for the future, but I just wanted to mention it.

Date: 2012-04-24 10:19 pm (UTC)
damigella: (automne)
From: [personal profile] damigella
I'm another one who didn't see the promo (just finished watching the ep), but you needn't feel sorry, the whole comm is exploding with spoilers - livejournal has been unreachable for more than two hours now, and it's probably due to all the h/w fans posting more and more infos behind flimsier and flimsier covers :).

Anyway, the 43" _I_ saw (those that were actually in the ep) were absolutely amazing and believable. The promo, I'll want to see in context.

I must be the only one who was pissed at this episode, for reasons that have nothing at all to do with Wilson's health. But I can;t really rant before I've read what everyone else has written... which I can't do now.

And you're so brave. Onward, indeed.


Totally OT: "Onward!" was the title (Avanti!) of the official newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party. I'm so old not only do I remember the Italian Socialist Party, I even remember when most Italian Socialists were honest :).

Date: 2012-04-25 01:07 am (UTC)
topaz_eyes: (Hello Kidney)
From: [personal profile] topaz_eyes
There seems to be a connection between thymoma and myasthenia gravis, but it's hard to tell from the literature which comes first (chicken and egg syndrome, also known as cart-before-the-horse disease). But that may be what Wilson's real concern is -- that he'll develop MG, or he's already showing symptoms that he thinks are related to MG. If he does have both, the prognosis is not as good as for thymoma alone,

MG is an auto-immune disease; for some auto-immune diseases, e.g. celiac, the incidence of lymphoma is higher than that for the general population. (The faster the immune cells proliferate, the more likely a cancer-causing mutation will arise.) /pedantic

Date: 2012-04-25 03:16 am (UTC)
topaz_eyes: (HouseWilson)
From: [personal profile] topaz_eyes
Ironically, I learned about the increased incidence of lymphoma from House, in "Forever," back when they seemed to care about the medicine.

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