As many as 2 million Americans have the disease, which attacks the intestines, but doctors routinely misdiagnose it. His primary care physician had him on six different medications, some prescribed for migraines, others for depression, and still others for the side effects from the migraine meds.
The suffering was so severe that the patient took to bed for days at a time, tracking his headaches on a calendar, hoping to divine a pattern to the pain.
But no pattern emerged. Every doctor he saw seemed to be grasping at straws: One prescribed an antifungal medication; another, allergy shots. Bizarrely, Bolte seized upon a single symptom: The man casually mentioned an intolerance to egg yolks. If true, this seemingly innocuous point could narrow his problem down to only one or two possible diagnoses, one of them being heavy metal poisoning. Sifting through the file, Bolte found a hair analysis that the desperate patient had commissioned at an alternative pharmacy: The results showed elevated levels of mercury.
Yes, the patient said, he had shared that result with his original doctor, who pooh-poohed the test and told him that if he was concerned about it, he might want to reduce his fish intake. Bolte ordered a DMSA challenge test, in which a drug is taken orally that extracts heavy metals — if they exist — from tissues and excretes them in urine.
The urinalysis revealed extremely high levels of mercury. The man responded well to medication and a new diet that flushed much of the dangerous toxin out of his body. Two years later, he celebrated his first headache-free month. Another time, a woman presented with headaches, fatigue, hives, rash, and countless chemical sensitivities.
After a lifetime of fine health, she broke out with the most annoying physical symptoms from using soaps, shampoos, and cleansers. After a blood workup revealed the presence of hexane, a petroleum derivative known to cause nerve damage, Bolte asked her about her living conditions. She boasted that she had a fine new home. After living in a one-bedroom apartment for years, she bought and renovated the apartment next door after the birth of her first child.
Now she had a roomy three-bedroom apartment, the kind of place New Yorkers would kill for. You have a gas stove, right? Where did the old stove in the old kitchen sit, exactly? Can you tell me? Do you remember? My bed is right up against the spot, she said. The patient bought and installed a small sauna unit, which she used to sweat out the toxin.
Her symptoms resolved in six months. When the chemical analysis came back from the lab, Bolte was stunned. He picked up the phone. He told Moore that her blood test had uncovered high levels of two toxic chemicals — 2-methylpentane and 3-methylpentane — both derived from petroleum products. Could there be something in her environment that was exposing her to abnormally high levels of petroleum products?
He pressed on. Have other neighbors been ill? She knew that one man who lived behind her had kidney cancer; that was all. Did she or anyone in her family work in a gas station? Was there a gas station near her home? There was nothing on the site but homes just like hers, all arranged in a subdivision with Hawaiian-sounding names.
In all his years of working on houses, the doctor had never visited a trailer park. He asked Moore to describe what they looked like. How were the homes constructed? Once at the site, the home is craned off the flatbed and placed onto concrete piers or cinder blocks, or permanently mounted to a custom-built foundation. Which does your home have? Bolte asked. A foundation? Or does it sit right above the ground? But she promised to look into it and get back to him.
He hung up reluctantly, half wondering if he should drive up north to help her, have a look around, and maybe photograph the site for his files. If she had lived there a long time in the presence of contaminated soil, her senses may have become inured to a faint petroleum smell that he would notice immediately.
When she was younger, perhaps, her immune system had been able to fend off the daily onslaught of toxins. But as she got older, they had gained the upper hand. If she spent time outdoors working, living, or gardening, she would have inhaled toxic fumes and consumed particles as part of her daily routine — and at night as she slept.
A few weeks later, Moore called with news. At her urging, the local board of health had pulled the real estate records and discovered she and some of her neighbors were living on the site of a former industrial train depot used by Standard Oil in the late 19th century.
An independent lab tested the soil for petrochemicals. Shortly after, the owners of the property voluntarily offered to excavate, remove, and replace the soil under the homes of Moore and some of her neighbors.
By January , the levels of toxins in her body had dropped to almost nothing, and she was living a normal life once again. The doctor wishes he knew more about her, but she dropped out of sight sometime after their last meeting in August Beyond that, the case file is silent on the Adventure of the Petroleum-Poisoned Senior.
He thinks he may have a Christmas card from her somewhere in his files. So, even though their relationship does not last, the fact that he managed to attract her in at all is a little questionable. Being such an incredible doctor, House knows exactly what he's doing when it comes to treating his patients.
He has an encyclopedic knowledge of various diseases and what to do with them, which is what makes him so great. Of course, House is also in extreme pain all of the time, which leads him to test various medications on himself to make the pain go away. Being such a knowledgeable doctor, he should know the often high risks that come along with these medications - including affecting his abilities as a doctor. And yet, he keeps testing these potential cures on himself.
When House and the team of fellows are called in for cases of rare diseases, it is almost always the members of House's talented group who actually get sent in to deal with the patients - talking to them, performing the basic checks and tests, and acting as liaisons between the injured individual and the aloof House.
Because House's team is not called in every day, and House himself keeps the interaction with patients to a minimum, it comes as something of a surprise to hear that House apparently visits the Human Resources department two times every day on average.
Visiting HR on a frequent basis makes a lot of sense for the character, but twice a day? Even if we take this as slightly exaggerated, it seems a bit impossible. In the season two episode, "Distractions," we first meet House's old schoolmate, Philip Weber. The two immediately clash, based on years of old grudges and resentment. In the past, Weber discovered that House was copying one of his exam answers.
Almost immediately, he turned House in - which resulted in his expulsion and cost him a prestigious internship. Weber took the internship for himself, and House has never forgiven him. House is so intelligent that one has to wonder why he would cheat on a test. Weber says House was known for cutting corners, but that seems hard to believe considering how in-depth and relentless House can be when it comes to treating the sick.
House breaks a lot of rules - but sometimes, that rampant rule-breaking moves into breaking the actual law. In season three, a series of events leads to House being caught with illegal medication by Detective Tritter. This soon gets amped up to a charge of trafficking narcotics when excessive amounts are discovered in his apartment. By the finale of this story arc, House manages to get away without having to do any jail time - just going to rehab - and Detective Tritter disappears from his radar.
The circumstances that lead to this, and the final conclusion of the judge presiding over House's case with Tritter, are shaky at best - but House keeps getting away with things. When we are first introduced to House, we're not given a complete explanation as to what actually happened to his leg, but in the masterful episode "Three Stories," we finally get the full account of the infarction, and painful aftermath.
We learn that Stacy, acting as House's medical proxy while he was in a coma, opted to have House's leg muscle removed because House continued to refuse amputation. House's resentment and anger ultimately collapsed their relationship - but Stacy only tried to do what he wanted and also somehow find a middle ground.
He's still not over it when she finds him again and asks him to treat her new husband. As per the previous entry in this list, the injury to House's leg takes place before the series begins. In all the time since then, House is miserably bitter about the incident, often using it as an excuse to lash out at the people around him and take so many painkillers that he can hardly see straight.
Even though he eventually gets over his resentment to Stacy and is able to move on, it still takes him six whole seasons of the show in the episode "Help Me" to finally admit that he should have had his leg amputated from the beginning. If he had, he would have saved himself all this pain. For such a brilliant doctor who is troubled by so much pain, why couldn't he come to this conclusion sooner?
Apart from generally keeping his interactions with real patients to an absolute minimum, House causes a great deal of other problems for Cuddy and the hospital. Not only should he be doing significantly more clinic duty - or at least, some actual clinic duty - but he is abrasive and rude to everyone around him, causing the many complaints to HR that we mentioned before.
Add to that his salary, which must be fairly large, and all the medications that he uses, and House must surely be more trouble than he's worth to keep on. We all have a birthday, even if we choose not to celebrate it. While Gregory House may seem like the kind of guy to let a date like that go unnoticed so that he can avoid having to socialize further with the people around him, he must surely know what the actual date of his birth is, right?
Same should go for the hospital in which he is employed. And yet, we see proof of House's birthday multiple times, and on at least two separate occasions, we are told conflicting things. When we see his driver's license in "Two Stories," his birthday is stated as May 15th, Lisa Sanders makes no apologies for being a big fan of one not-always-realistic medical drama.
Gregory House. Here is what we learned. They also turn to Sanders for help in coming up with potential maladies to feature. What can happen to him? She was particularly drawn to stories about medicine, and eventually decided to pursue a career in the field.
After completing the two-year Post-Baccalaureate Premedical Program at Columbia University, she was accepted into the Yale School of Medicine, graduating in at the age of Developing a story that makes sense is basically what medicine is all about. Diagnosing a patient is like solving a mystery: You pull all the little strands together in a way that makes sense.
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