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lizzydizzyyo · 6 months

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I think what's really compelling about House's absolute unwillingness to bow down to anything or anyone (the ethical board, the law, extra rich CEO, vindictive police officer, and even the patients themselves) regardless of how absolutely batshit and downright illegal his actions are, is because it's coming from a chronically disabled person, in more ways than one.

He cannot walk without agony or his cane. His chronic and severe pain led him down the path of deep Vicodin addiction until he also becomes psychologically dependent on it too (once, Dr Cuddy gives him saline placebo and it "works", in that he is not feeling his leg pain anymore for a few hours).

He understands it deeply just how desperate people can be when they're in pain and nobody can (or are willing to) help them—at least, so far, until they land on his doorstep. Which is canonically the most extreme step patients take when everything else fails—you don't just go straight to Plainsborough Teaching Hospital and to Dr Gregory House MD's office; you have to go through dozens of other doctors in various specialties and failed treatments too.

(Although that's a separate discussion about how doctors, particularly resident ones, are overworked and underpaid and redtaped by shithead insurance companies even if they do know how to treat a patient and want to).

He knows, from the bottom of his heart, that having such a painful and life-limitting debilitating condition is comparable to hell on earth, because he has one. He knows, that despite his disability being visible to everyone, yet no one wants to put an effort to help him deal with it—is also hell on earth.

Cuddy simply throws money at him and turns the other way to his Vicodin abuse, like she is saying, "I don't care if he takes 10 Vicodin pills a day or more, and I have to pay at least $1M every year for lawsuits, as long as he gets the job done," (and when they decide to go into relationship, she immediately drops him when he relapses, even if the reason for his relapse is her—although, yes, there is another discussion to be had about keeping yourself and your child(ren) safe being a priority compared to helping an addict, recovering or not). Wilson, as loyal as he is to House, simply either enables him or lectures him without going into the root of the issue and thoroughly help House that way. His subordinates, especially after the original trio, are simply too scared, too ignorant, or too ambitious to even approach the issue and choose to keep their job than help House (also another discussion to be had about how you can't help people who don't want to help themselves and so on).

So when he sees a patient who has gone through hell trying to get a correct diagnosis and treatment, he becomes laser-focused on doing everything under the sun to get to the bottom of it and cure the patient. He doesn't care if he has to break into countless of houses (haha pun) and collect insane and probably biohazard samples to do it—he absolutely will, no question.

Yes, hate-criming and being a bigot is his favorite hobby (still livid at the asexual ep and the production's choice for the resolution, let's just say I still have beef with Hugh Laurie and the entire production team for it), and so is insulting patients in so many ways that Shakespeare would personally fly to New Jersey and shake his hands if someone manage to successfully perform necromancy on ol' Billy boy. But House is no one if not dedicated. "Yes, my patient is an idiot, everyone is an idiot too, but I WILL cure their condition like my life depends on it," is basically his middle name.

Besides, you can make the argument that he is more compassionate than all the other doctors around him, because despite his absolute disdain towards some of his patients' beliefs and stupidity, he still works his ass off to treat them. He will call your god an idiot in 7 different languages while putting you in a diagnostic machine he manipulated the whole hospital into letting him use so that you could get a test which weren't available to you before. He will tell you that your currently-happy marriage will end in a bloody divorce and your ex will leave you penniless so love is not real while injecting you with a medication he had to hack the CDC's database for.

There are even episodes that show him being truly earnest, like the clinic duty scene where he is snarky as usual to a girl who seemingly stupidly had unprotected sex until she lashes out, and House is like, "Oh shit, this is above my paygrade", and immediately goes to Cuddy with a very serious expression and no sarcastic dilly-daliying, demanding her to transfer the patient to someone else because he is not good with "curing" rape case (interesting choice on the writers' part to make the patient insist to have therapy with House, though).

There is an episode about a very workaholic woman executive in a fashion company who has tremor and partial paralysis, and later on it's shown that she seems to tie her worth as a person to her corporate success while band-aiding her deep psychological issue like her suicidal ideation, and House genuinely asks her, "Do you want to live? I cannot help you unless you want me to," or something along the line.

There is also the cursed 9-year-old terminal brain cancer episode where Chase kissed the patient (ew), where at first it shows House being a usual misanthophe to Wilson and saying, "She is not brave, it's the brain tumor clot talking because it must be near the amygdala." Later in the episode, House sits near the patient alone, and compassionately asks her if she even wants to live, going through the rest of her short-lived but horrible agony, even if they catch the clot. The surgery to find and get rid of the clot is risky and can debilitate her even more, and this is why House is laying the decision to her hands. That she gets to choose. This is what truly reveals to him that she is genuinely brave (aside from the scan showing the clot to be so far away from her amygdala), but for the wrong reason. She is brave for her mom, willing to go through horrible surgery and drag out her already painful cancer-ridden life because, "My mom needs me". When everyone is congratulating her in the end, you can tell House has a bittersweet expression of both awe towards her bravery, and sadness that this 9-year-old sick girl has to bear the brunt of her horrible pain just so that her mother is not sad. That he couldn't convince her to be a child until the nearing end of her life.

The most interesting evidence of his compassion to me is the gunman hostage episode. It might sound weird because in the whole episode, he is depicted to first want to outsmart the gunman patient, then becomes laser-focused but only because he sees it as a puzzle, then absolutely selfish and dangerous because he volunteers himself as the last hostage and gives the gun back to the guy after the MRI. I do think it's true that his dedication to solving patients-are-just-puzzle-to-me conditions shines through in the episode, especially the scene of him returning his gun, but there is something else I catch when I rewatched it before.

When the gunman patient is put in the MRI because Cameron tells him a theory through the hostage call, the remaining doctors in the room including House are wary at the gunman but also hopeful. Yet, when the result shows up on the screen, he realizes that the theory is wrong and the guy let go his only bargaining chip for nothing. If you watch this part carefully, you'll notice that House actually looks pitying and sad at the gunman's disappointed demeanor and expression. He realizes he is going to be another notch in the guy's failed doctors list, and at this point (with the gun given away and even the best, most talented doctor also not finding out what's wrong with him), the guy has given up hope that he will ever see the day he will be cured, certainly not behind the bars.

Yes, his thirst for puzzle is House's big driving force in giving back the gun, but you'll be lying to yourself if you don't notice House's compassion for the guy because he doesn't want the guy to go out empty-handed, with absolutely no more hope because House knows once they step out of the door, this guy will never, ever be allowed to be in the vicinity of any hospital or doctor ever again in his life, aside from jail's bare-minimum exams and medications. House can't handle the thought of putting someone else through his own disappointment—that nothing works to help his leg pain. He especially doesn't want to be the cause for this gunman guy's case either. Even in the end when House realizes the guy is a fucking moron because he doesn't know that Florida is, in fact, in earthwide-horizontal tropical zone and this is what stumps most of the guy's previous doctors—House still gives him a subtle salute to the guy while being handcuffed and led away, almost to say, "Enjoy your healing and the defeat of your arch nemesis The Sickness™, glad to be part of it."

Majority of his drive to stop at nothing until his patient is cured is definitely thanks to his own fucked-up leg, even if there are some dialogues with Cuddy and Stacy Warner (House's ex wife) that seem to imply he has always been a misanthrophe whose hobby is getting into malpractice (or general) lawsuits. I wholeheartedly believe that after his leg clot rendered him disabled and with chronic pain, he became much more dedicated and obsessed with getting to the bottom of a patient's medical information, even for info that seems innocuous or irrelevant that always turn out to be important (probably more like a plot armor than established characterization, to be honest), almost like this is his method of relating to the patients in his own weirdly human way, and maybe a little bit (actually, a lot) of projecting.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

#house md #rec #media analysis #writing #english #me #i hv more to say abt this show like him making the mistake of not amputating his leg bc of his bias against (particularly visible)disabilit #even tho cuddy and his other past ortho surgeons suggest against keeping the leg because the clot is really bad and unsalvagable #years later even while having his leg it's now useless because all it gives him is pain and anger issue with a dash of opioid addiction #so when he sees patient being stupid or refusing a certain test/treatment he KNOWS in the bottom of his heart to be right #he just won't take it lying down & he will drag his patients kicking & screaming bc ''trust me i was an idiot too don't repeat my mistake''#but that's an essay for another day #whump #whump meta #disability

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stigmvtas-archived · 8 months

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it's 10pm on a monday night. tws for grief, brief suicidal ideation.

it's 10pm on a monday night - the sky's clear, the clearest it might've been all month; and all ducky sees as he stares up into the sky is a thousand stars glaring down back at him. it's 10pm on a monday night - and ducky doesn't remember the last time he's slept; everything's nothing more but haze, vision cloudier than usual - even in his bad eye. it's 10pm on a monday night - and freya's been dead for just about over 24 hours now, and ducky's calves throb a dull yet consistent beat against the cold, wet sand that the waves constantly exposed. there's snow in his hair - and snow still stuck to his lashes, and he can barely feel the permanent shiver that's begun to reside in his body; nor the waves lapping against his dull yet consistently throbbing calves - dancing over his knees, denim clinging like saranwrap. clinging like a tarp - clinging like the body bag that must've carried freya out. it's 10pm on a monday night - and the stars double over one another as warm tears melt away the snow on his lashes, cloud his already cloudy vision - salt mingling with salt; the tears grow colder the farther they slip, somewhere beyond his temple and into his rigid hair.

he doesn't really remember how he's landed here - flat on his back, probably letting frostbite settle into his bones; he'll be surprised if his pinky toes aren't already goners - he can't tell between cold - numb and regular - numb anymore. somewhere the lines got blurred - and even crying, ducky feels strangely devoid of emotion. ducky feels devoid of a lot of things; messy blonde hair, the warmth of a flannel - warmth in general, really. even her dry sarcasm and the callous nature she subjected others to when she meant to push them away - felt warm; warmer than ducky felt now, at least. he shouldn't have gotten - mad. no - he should've been mad, but he should've helped her anyways. he should've - stayed. instead of running from his fears - from vinny, he should've stayed. maybe he would've - seen her again. maybe he could've changed something. if freya was here - she'd probably make fun of him. prod his side with the toe of her shoe, hands stuffed into the pockets of a hoodie that hadn't been hers.

it's 10pm on a monday night - and ducky's high, and he's drunk, but sobering up - the small bottle in his pocket's got only a sip left, but it doesn't matter. he clambers up onto his elbows - stiff as a board, stiff as a body already cold on a slab of metal, stiff as freya - shaking hands and shaking fingers clumsily fighting their way into his coat's pocket, the bottom hem beginning to finally wet with the waves that hadn't quite reached thigh yet. the bottle's ice cold, or maybe it's ducky's hands - he can't feel much of them, either - and so is the liquor; but it's enough to warm his throat - to kick in some sort of survival instinct. he won't die tonight, even if he wants to - he's not somewhere remote, not on an island this small; there's lights dotting the beach to his left - a splattering of houses and businesses further down the boardwalk. maybe he'll lose a limb, at the very most - what's another, anyways?

it's 10pm on a monday night, and ducky's freezing - and he feels it now, the clatter in his teeth, as he forces himself up and towards the lights. part of him wants to fling himself back in the ocean, to wade farther and farther until his head's only a bauble above the surface, until his eyes match the double - vision stars that mirror against the ocean the further he looks - as the waves calm and steady, and become nothing but teasing laps at his nose and ears. ducky presses on - towards the houses, and the businesses, and the people he doesn't know are searching for him; his calves begin to throb again - how many miles had he run? how long - until he wound up at the beach? it doesn't matter, maybe. he doesn't know what does, anymore - at least tonight. maybe tomorrow he'll have - better sense. maybe tomorrow - it'll have all been a bad dream, and ducky will wake up against a lumpy mattress, and beside a warm body; and there'll still be crushed grapes that they hadn't brushed out of the bed, yet - because they would've had time to clean it up. there would've been time.

he doesn't remember when his feet hit sidewalk, and not sand - because nothing feels solid beneath his feet, anymore - and he's made it this far, but maybe it's not far enough - and he can feel the rest of his energy burning up; at least something's warm, if only the acknowledgment that he's run out of fuel. that there's nothing else to give - that he's barebones. it's 10pm on a monday night, and ducky finds his phone - and it takes a good minute to turn it on, because he has to physically press his hand against the fingers trying to press into the damn button, because his fingers barely work anymore - because it's cold, because ducky's damn cold. his damn - cold fingers swipe hastily - as hastily as they can move, at least - and he doesn't have to scroll to find the contact he wants - the contact he needs, before pressing call - before bringing the phone to his ear. he can feel how his knees buckle beneath him - but not their contact with the concrete, one palm firm against the cold - lungs trying their best not to heave, and he wants to just - lay there, again. in the snow, again - but he stays on his knees, back hunched forward, curling up into himself as if it'll bring the warmth back - though he knows nothing will. and he sits - and he waits, with all the patience in the world - as the phone rings on.

#––– ❛ donovan mercer 【 you bleed just like you puke / para. 】#grief tw #suicidal ideation tw #small bt #this isnt read over it came straight frm the heart </3 #somebody get this man a doctor btw. gna hv no toes. no fingers.#THIS IS NOT A DEATH PARA!!!!#THIS IS AN EMO PARA!!!!#DUCKY'S ALIVE!!!#literally was going to be a starter bt then. it got this long so uuhhhh #if someone replies 2 it like it's a starter tho who am i 2 refuse

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