Episode Summary

After being stitched up and brought back to consciousness, we learn that our daredevil police officer, Donny, doesn’t care about his own health; he’s convinced that he’s going to die of a heart attack on his upcoming fortieth birthday like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him.

While Chase, Cameron and Foreman examine the remains of Donny’s dead paternal relatives, a woman comes into House’s office, telling him that she had a son with the patient, who doesn’t know he has a child. In usual House fashion, he forsakes emotion and instead spites the patient, giving him a fake diagnosis and treatment for the illness he doesn’t have.

Alas, four hours after being discharged, Donny dies. The body is brought in for an immediate autopsy; when Foreman begins to cut into Donny’s chest cavity, blood flows out of the incision (an unnatural reaction for a cadaver) and Donny suddenly opens his eyes and screams.

While Foreman and House are dealing with Lazarus the cop, Chase becomes increasingly guilt-ridden over the Dibala debacle (See House: “The Tyrant”). He decides to go to church for confession, but the Father’s advice is not what Chase wants to hear, and so he instead returns home eight hours later, completely wasted.

An additional side story in the episode involves House and his fight for sanity. While sleeping at Wilson’s house, House thinks he hears whispering, making him paranoid of reappearing psychosis. After several days of sleuthing, he realizes the whispering is the sound of Wilson softly talking to his dead girlfriend, Amber, traveling through the vents.

Later, while House is arguing (and flirting) with Cuddy during rounds she forces him to do to help get his license back, he has his usual epiphany, realizing that Donny is suffering from a brain aneurism. Donny and his newly discovered son go in for surgery to remove their respective aneurisms, and everyone returns to relative normalcy.

What Worked

House’s attempt at rounds was nothing short of hilarious. While brief, it completely encapsulated the reasons that we love Dr. Gregory House.

What Didn’t

House’s “hearing whispers” phenomena, while clearly an attempt at continuing the thread of emotional sincerity in House, didn’t fully hit the mark, and ultimately was a waste of airtime.

Predictions

We’ve got a brief hiatus from House coming up in the following weeks, with our favorite doc coming back in early November. I’m expecting a big bang of a return episode, with expansion on Chase’s lies to Cameron and House and Cuddy’s burgeoning relationship.

Farrukh Virani

Update: 4/29/09:

After more than three weeks of waiting, Jeffrey Cattel is finally a Northwestern student.

Although the Medill prospie said he was “99.9 percent in the door for NU” for several weeks, he did not receive financial aid information until Friday — giving him only a week to decide on a school.

“That was the only con in the entire process of applying,” he said. “It was so slow on their part.”

Cattel said the delayed financial aid information is due to his parents’ taking longer to file this year’s taxes. While other schools offered him at least an estimate for financial aid, Cattel said Northwestern was the last school to send him a financial aid letter.

During the application and decision process, Cattel and his parents worked with a local college planner to make sure they filled out financial documents correctly and understood the financial aid awards Cattel received.

“We just wanted to make sure we don’t make any missteps,” Cattel said. “Sort of to make sure we’re going through the process correctly, since it’s my parents’ first time.”

Cattel and his parents submitted the tuition reply Tuesday. He said it felt good to be done with the decision.

“It’s nice to think further,” he said. “There’s an end to the SATs, to the application process.”

Cattel, who participated in the National High School Institute Journalism “Cherub” program, said he knows of about 20 of his peers from the program who will be attending Northwestern next year. Having close friends among that group, he said, will make starting college more comfortable.

“You’ve been around the same people for 12 years, so it’s a little scary going somewhere new,” he said. “It’s like starting first grade again.”

Cattel said he is looking forward to having a roommate and taking classes in Medill.

“It’s nice to have a happy ending,” he said.

Update: 4/28/09:

With the start of the 2009-2010 school year now only a few months away, early decision admitted student Elise Butler is looking forward to studying journalism at Medill and having a change of pace from high school.

“I’m excited to take more specific classes geared towards what I’m interested in because in my high school there are some electives junior and senior year, but there’s such a wide range of classes [at Northwestern] that I can pick and study,” Butler said. She added that she is also excited to meet all her classmates.

Although Butler has not yet decided which track she will pursue, she said she will most likely focus on magazine or newspaper.

“My school only has newspaper, that’s our only publication, and yearbook, so we don’t have any broadcast or radio or anything, so that’s what I’ve known for my years in high school,” she said. “I know that even if I go through the print journalism track, I’ll still learn about the other types of media.”

She also has begun thinking about where she wants to live on campus next year, and is currently deciding between between Communications Residential College and Allison Hall.

Jeffrey Cattel, a prospective Medill student from Canton, Mass., was introduced to Northwestern as a rising high school senior in Medill’s National High School Institute “cherub” program, a summer journalism program at Northwestern.

The five-week stay was “better than any college tour,” Cattel said, and now has him leaning heavily towards Northwestern as his college of choice.

The news and opinion editor of his school newspaper Spectrum, and a contributor to a local newspaper, Cattel had his eyes set on journalism, and especially Medill, as he began the college application process.

In fact, Cattel applied only to colleges that offered a journalism major or a separate school of journalism.

“I’ve known for a long time that journalism is what I’m passionate about,” he says.

In addition to Northwestern, he was accepted at Syracuse University, University of Maryland at College Park, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Wisconsin at Madison and University of Missouri at Columbia. He was rejected from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and waitlisted at New York University.

The rejection, he said, is hard for anyone, but “for me it was a little bit easier. “I was trying to stay on the bright side.”

Cattel says that other friends who applied to Northwestern received their decision e-mails several days before he received his. Getting the e-mail after days of waiting, he said, felt “surreal.”

“I waited for so long — at that point I had kind of accepted that I’d wait for a letter,” he said. “I was going to go to bed, and then I saw [the e-mail].” But Cattel is waiting for his financial aid package before he commits to Northwestern.

“I’m really interested in Northwestern because of all the places I applied, it’s on a different level,” he said. “Not that I wouldn’t be happy at another school, but it’s just at the top.”

When Kirk Vaclavik came to Chicago in September, it was initially to visit the University of Chicago. It was almost by accident that he found out about Northwestern through a friend.

“She had told me to visit Northwestern. She told me I’d love it, and it turns out I did,” the Carrollton, Texas native said.

Vaclavik initially applied to Columbia University early decision, but was deferred.

“[Columbia] was the one that I was so in love with at first, but after the deferral, when the actual rejection came it didn’t hurt as bad as if it had been when I got the deferral,” he said.

Although he is currently accepted at four universities — Northwestern, Cornell, University of Texas and Southern Methodist University — Vaclavik is only really considering two.

“It’s come down to just Northwestern and Cornell,” he said. “I’m very torn right now, it’s pretty much fifty-fifty.”

Vaclavik said that he was really motivated by the idea of leaving Texas.

“For me, it always has been one of my goals to go to a school that is not in Texas,” he said. “I wanted to go far away from that kind of experience to a complete different kind of ideology.”

Although his parents both graduated from Cornell, Vaclavik said that “they are completely supportive of going to either so long as the financial aid is not a huge difference. Other than that, it’s completely up to me.”

The criteria Vaclavik is using to decide between the two include the programs offered in each university’s school of communication — “ Northwestern wins that part, undoubtedly” — as well as location and campus.

For the Carrolton Christian Academy senior, the choice may come down to the wire, all the way to May 1.

“I never expected that it would come down to such a tough decision. I always thought it would be clear all the way,” he said.

Update: 4/28/09:

For Seana Peterson, deciding where to go to college was a matter of recognizing and vocalizing feelings that were already there, but not quite conscious. The Foxboro, Mass. senior had narrowed her choice to Northwestern and the honors program at the University of Virginia.

“I’m decided on Northwestern,” Peterson said, although she said she hasn’t paid her deposit yet. “I realized that I’d been talking to a lot more Northwestern students. I was always checking NU stuff. It seemed really natural.”

Peterson said she became aware that she was spending significant time on the Northwestern Web site and was barely even visiting the UVA site.

Before she can commit her deposit to Northwestern, though, Peterson is waiting to hear the results of her financial aid appeal. “Since I didn’t get any money, my parents are working on trying to get us evaluated” again, Peterson said.

Her interest in Northwestern built in the month or so since she was accepted, Peterson said. “When I went to NU for the first time, I had a really amazing tour guide.”

Peterson stayed overnight with a family friend who lives in a sorority and decided she “likes sorority life at Northwestern a lot better than what I saw at UVA.”

Another pull was the music program. After meeting with lecturer Chris Madsen and talking to music students, Peterson “felt really comfortable. It was everything I was looking for.” Peterson plans to stay in Weinberg for now, but take classes and potentially double major in the Bienen School of Music.

By any measure, Peterson was in a good position to choose a college when the admissions dust settled: she got into 12 out of 12 schools and did not require (or receive) significant financial aid from any of her schools. But with so many choices, and so little to distinguish them in terms of cost or viability, Peterson has had to make a few sacrifices to simplify her decision.

She decided not to visit Georgetown, a school that deferred her early application. Peterson is confident in her decision and didn’t want to unnecessarily complicate it by visiting another school. “I’m so set on NU,” she said.

When Vail Kohnert-Yount saw the admission e-mail from Northwestern in her inbox, she debated whether or not to grab her parents before clicking the fateful link.

“I remember thinking, ‘Well, it’s just Northwestern. If I get rejected, it’s not a big deal,’” Kohnert-Yount said. She opened the email by herself and saw a bold-lettered “Congratulations!” on the screen. While she quickly realized that her initial response to Northwestern was silly, Kohnert-Yount had yet to “fall in love” with the school, and hadn’t awaited its reply with as much anticipation as she did for letters from other colleges.

Kohnert-Yount’s good news from the Medill School of Journalism followed similar acceptances from the University of Texas, Wellesley, and Georgetown’s prestigious school of Foreign Service (where, she points out, Madeline Albright teaches). A deferment from Stanford’s early decision applications had come earlier.

After four acceptances and an acceptable deferment, the senior from Houston was feeling particularly pleased. Her mood shifted the following day, when she received rejections from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a wait listing from Brown.

“That was pretty harsh. I was kind of expecting to get in to at least one or two of those places, [and] I was really hoping for Stanford,” said Kohnert-Yount, a newspaper editor, soccer team captain, freelance journalist and D.C. intern when not a student at St. John’s School. “I cried for maybe seven and a half minutes … then I got over it. I’m so excited about the four of the other schools I got into.”

Kohnert-Yount is now faced with choosing between four very different college experiences. She has already ruled out Wellesley because she feared it wouldn’t give her a classic college experience. “If the guys at MIT are what you get excited about,” she said, then it wasn’t the place for her.

“Georgetown is kind of what I’m leaning toward right now,” Kohnert-Yount said. After interning for a Democratic congressman in Washington, D.C. last summer, she became familiar with the area. Kohnert-Yount is tempted by the Science, Technology, and International Affairs major. “Georgetown is a great fit for me,” she said.

But the politically minded senior has yet to pass judgment on Northwestern, a school she knows very little about. “It’s not a place where Houstonians flock to,” she said. Kohnert-Yount intends to visit soon and see for herself. In a car conversation, Kohnert-Yount recounts her mother saying, “I can’t think of a reason why you shouldn’t go to Northwestern. Besides the fact that it’s very very cold.”

Update: 4/28/09:

Fida Mohammad has put in a deposit at Northwestern, but he’s leaning elsewhere.

Cambridge university in England offered him a “very generous” scholarship of £13,000 (about $19,000) per year, “so that’s kind of [tilted] me towards Cambridge more than anything else.”

But Mohammad won’t know exactly what he’s doing until August. British universities give conditional offers, so he must ace his “A-Level” entrance exams in order to be allowed in at Cambridge.

He did choose Northwestern over Brown. “I blame the emails that Northwestern’s been sending consistently,” he said. “They just make me want to go there!”

Emily Hittner received her Northwestern acceptance the classic way.

It was one of the top schools on her list, and one of the last she had yet to hear from. She hadn’t been checking her acceptance status online, and reached into her mailbox one day to find a large, smooth Northwestern envelope.

“I was so excited,” the Smithtown, NY high school senior said. “I was not really sure if I was going to get into Northwestern.”

She immediately began calling her friends and parents to share the excitement.

While this letter was good news, it didn’t mean that Hittner, who is interested in biology or chemistry, could make her final decision. She still had to wait for another letter — the one with her financial aid offer.

“My parents reminded me I couldn’t go [to Northwestern] unless I got a good financial aid package, which kind of brought down the moment a little bit,” she said.

Hittner has plenty of options. She applied to a total of 12 schools and got into the State Universities of New York at Binghamton and Buffalo, Pennsylvania State University, University of Pittsburgh, Cornell University, Boston University, University of North Carolina, University of Virgina, University of Chicago, and Northwestern. She was waitlisted at Duke and rejected from Johns Hopkins.

While Hittner said Northwestern is her top pick because of its strength in both science and music programs, the financial aid package she recently received is making the decision a difficult one. Her aid award was lower than offers from other schools. There is a gap between how much Northwestern will foot the bill, and how much she can afford, whereas the University of Buffalo, for example, offered her a full ride.

“Financially, Buffalo would be the best choice for me,” Hittner said. Attending Northwestern means taking out private loans, and paying them back herself. “Northwestern has a stronger science program, so I guess I have to weigh the benefits,” she said. Hittner would like to attend medical school, and leaving college with fewer loans would make medical school easier to finance.

Depending on her decision, Hittner said she might be “upset initially, but I’ll move on.” She said she would be happy wherever she ends up.

“Once I go to college, I’m not still going to be crying about it,” she said.