The unfortunate patient in “House M.D.,” Season 8, Episode 9, “Better Half” is a man named Andres who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. He has a long suffering young wife named Natalie and, most alarmingly, starts to cough up blood.
Spoilers follow.
The examination of Andres, which involves the poor man having the obligatory seizures, going into hyperthermia, blood in the urine, and into an uncontrolled paranoid rage, finally ends with his being diagnosed with Reyes syndrome. He is cured of that. Unfortunately he is still going to die eventually of complications of Alzheimer’s. This may be of some frustration to Joseph, who is apparently Natalie’s backstairs guy.
The more interesting part of the episode involves House’s new game of leaving posted notes in the bottom of chairs that predict the behavior of various members of his team, including Foreman who sits in for Taub, who is absent during this episode. House’s keen understanding of human nature and his knowledge of how people around him tick make this an interesting game, albeit irritating for the other people involved.
Part of the reason for the game is that House is maneuvering Foreman to allow his ankle bracelet to be taken off. House’s theory is that the bracelet is a crutch for Foreman’s efforts to keep House managed. The effort finally succeeds.
The fun part of the episode involves a patient of Wilson’s named Kayla who is in the clinic for a bladder infection. Kayla claims that she and her husband are “asexual” which means that they have no sex drive and therefore no sex life. This piques House’s interest, who bets Wilson a hundred dollars that he came prove something medically wrong.
Sure enough, House finds out that the husband has a tumor pressing on his pituitary gland, thus lowering his sex drive and causing erectile dysfunction. Kayla actually has a normal libido, but has been pretending for her husband’s sake. Once the tumor is removed, the two can then consummate their marriage after 10 years of actually being married. Sadly the episode did not cover that part. House is unbearably smug about it, however.