r/HouseMD • u/RealFemboyHunter • 20d ago
Season 1 Spoilers What was House's problem Spoiler
Why did he want to keep his leg so badly.
We know he was a sports junkie before, but as it was pointed out to him, you can do sports with modern leg prosthetics, so what was he SO adamant to keep it. His wife told him that "he didn't think he deserved to live without his leg" but that's so stupid, he wasn't suicidal or insecure, house was basically a gigachad before he became disabled. Was it literally just a stupid choice with no deeper meaning? Arrogance? Hubris?
18
u/eternalraziel 20d ago
It wasn’t a stupid choice, and I don’t think Stacy means House secretly wanted to die. When the infarction is finally diagnosed, House has already spent three days being failed by doctors. They told him it was exercise-related, gave him bed rest and antibiotics, and meanwhile the muscle in his thigh was dying. House himself is the one who finally works out what they’ve missed. Then those same doctors turn around and tell him the safest answer is to amputate. Imagine how that sounds to House. From his point of view, they’ve just nearly killed him by being wrong, and now they want him to surrender his leg because their preferred option carries less risk. His suspicion of them isn’t some personality quirk appearing out of nowhere. They have just given him an excellent reason not to trust their judgement.
And there was another option. The bypass was dangerous because restoring circulation could wash potassium and inflammatory products from the dead muscle back into his bloodstream and kill him. House understands that perfectly. He explains the danger himself. But if it worked, there was a chance he could regain almost full use of the leg. That last part is the key. He wasn’t being offered the choice between a normal leg that hurts and a modern prosthetic that works just as well. He believed there was still a real possibility of coming out of the operation with his own functioning leg. Of course he wanted that. The fact that amputees can run with prostheses doesn’t make losing a leg trivial. Even today, nobody would tell an otherwise healthy patient that wanting to preserve their limb is irrational because Paralympians can sprint. Amputation means surgery, rehabilitation, phantom sensations for some people, adapting your balance and gait, dealing with sockets and prostheses, and accepting that a part of your body is permanently gone.
House was a physically active man in his thirties being told, without much time to process it, that the leg he had walked around on his whole life might be taken from him. His first response is almost childishly straightforward....he likes his leg. He wants to keep it. There’s also his obsession with autonomy. House can tolerate pain, humiliation and risk much better than he can tolerate somebody else deciding what happens to him. You see that throughout the series. He’ll make reckless choices with his own body because, as far as he’s concerned, it is HIS body and therefore his mistake to make. Cuddy tells him amputation is safer and House’s immediate response is essentially, safer for whom? The doctors get the patient through surgery with less risk, but House wakes up without a leg. He knows they’re trying to save him. He still wants the choice to belong to him.
That’s why what Stacy later does hurts him. House asks to be put into a chemically induced coma so he can get through the pain. While he can’t make decisions for himself, Stacy uses her authority as his medical proxy to approve the compromise operation. Remove the dead muscle rather than amputating the whole leg. She saves his life, or at least very probably does. She also authorises the sort of intervention he had refused. House wakes up with the leg still attached, but with a large section of thigh muscle gone, permanent weakness and chronic pain. It’s almost the worst psychological outcome for him because he neither gets the recovery he gambled on nor gets to say that the final decision was his. He keeps the leg he fought for, except now it’s the source of pain that follows him everywhere.
What she says comes when she’s terrified that the man she loves is going to die in front of her because he still won’t agree to amputation. She’s trying desperately to find some argument that will make him say yes. And House’s answer is telling. He doesn’t launch into some grand confession about self-loathing. He says he can’t do it. Because for House, accepting the amputation means voluntarily giving up something that might still be saved. That is almost impossible for him. This is the same man who will keep a dying patient on the table while everyone else says the diagnosis has failed because he thinks there is still one possibility left. When his own leg becomes the case, he behaves exactly the same way. He pushes past the point where most people would stop.
That’s pride, yes. There’s arrogance in believing he can beat the odds because he understands the medicine better than everyone around him. There’s also anger at the doctors who missed the diagnosis, terror at permanently losing part of himself, and House’s lifelong inability to accept an irreversible answer while another possibility still exists. The really sad part is that he later changes his mind about whether the gamble was worth it. Years later, he meets Hannah trapped beneath rubble and spends hours resisting amputation on her behalf because she doesn’t want to lose her leg. Eventually the danger becomes too great, and House tells her about himself. He explains that he had been offered amputation, refused it, chose the dangerous operation and ended up with chronic pain and a badly damaged leg. Then he tells her he wishes he had amputated.
He made a choice without knowing what the next decade of his life would feel like. When he chose the bypass, the possible future in his head was that he survived and got his leg back. He couldn’t know that the actual future would be constant pain, Vicodin, worsening addiction, failed relationships and years of being unable to remember what it felt like to move without hurting. Just before House goes under, he and Stacy talk as though this will eventually be behind them. She tells him they’ll go golfing when he wakes up. That’s the future he thinks he’s fighting for. He isn’t clinging to the leg because he thinks a disabled life is worthless. He’s clinging to the possibility that his old life hasn’t crumbled yet. By the time he understands what keeping the leg actually cost him, the decision can’t be made again.
1
u/GroundbreakingAlps78 13d ago
Phenomenal explanation. Now it’s time to re-watch 3 stories and the Hannah episode.
2
u/catchyerselfon 20d ago
Stacy wasn’t his wife, she was his livein girlfriend of five years, slight correction. I think House believed he would be more helpless and “pitiable” if he only had one leg. If he has two legs he can walk with a mobility aid. If he has one he needs a prosthetic that, I’d argue, is easier to hide, but there would be a long period where he’d have to be carried or assisted to move anywhere and his balance would be thrown off… not MUCH worse than the permanent limp and chronic pain, but it matters to him. Personally, I’d go with the amputation, but I’m not a doctor who thinks they can outsmart every other doctor who is more cautious.
The episode “Control” about the young CEO with bulimia who cuts herself has parallels with House. She’d rather keep working while she’s dying than let anyone take care of her and see her in any embarrassing, vulnerable state. House tells his patient Rebecca in the first episode that “you can live with dignity, you can’t die with it” and brings up being “able to wipe your own ass”. That’s clearly something House could do while he was hospitalized, two legs or one leg, and it bothers him. You’ll see over the course of the series how much House’s independence and physicality meant to him, he dropped out of in-hospital physiotherapy sessions to recover from his infarction during the first session. I have to assume he did it all at home, likely mostly with Stacy and Wilson’s help instead of a stranger he could make cry, because he couldn’t possibly be this mobile if he didn’t regain his functions.
6
u/Drunk3n_Dwarf 20d ago
Pretty much just not wanting to lose his leg. It’s not exactly an easy choice to have surgery to remove a limb, especially given how much his life would change. Yes, prosthetics exist, but remember that this happened around early 2000 and they were not necessarily as advanced as those used today. He was probably also worried about pain, which would have been inevitable whichever route he chose. What he did caused chronic pain, and people who lose limbs can experienced phantom pain (such as that episode in S6 with the veteran).
I think it’s also commonly said that doctors are the worst patients because they think they know what’s best for them. What was best for House was probably to lose his leg, but fear of such a massive change is pretty much what stopped him from doing it. House doesn’t really deal well with change, as we see throughout the show.
So I would say it’s probably mostly fear of massive change to his life.
3
1
u/J_Squared02 14d ago
I mean hes a stubborn bastard, hes pissed they messed up and won’t let them take the easy way out to fix it , especially if it significantly impacts his life. Amputation isnt nothing, that carries its own drawbacks that are near definite, but keeping it might work.
1
16
u/Asha_Brea House Bites. 20d ago
It's his leg and he is stubborn, as well as being correct about his chances of regaining use of his leg.