And just like that, my addiction to this series ended. This wouldn’t be a spoiler as House, MD, my favorite doctor who graced the silver screen for eight seasons spanning eight years of sarcasm and brilliance, ended in 2012.
He “died”.
Well, sort of.
For two months, I was hooked to House in the same manner that House was hooked to vicodin. I savored every case by letting my non-medical brain cells immerse in conditions such as sarcoidosis, Kawasaki, amyloidosis, Chagas, lupus, and even rare cases such as Ricketsiallpox, the Mirror syndrome, and gold poisoning.
Thankfully, watching all episodes didn’t result to cerebral constipation. It did, however, made my already weird sleeping pattern… weirder. I watched the series in between writing papers, essays, and articles for graduate school and this blog. Or while breastfeeding my now 10-week-old infant. I wouldn’t be surprise if he started talking at this age and giving me a medical diagnosis of my occasional irritability and back pains. House would think the two are connected somehow.
I watched the show through Netflix – and if you’re familiar with this service, you’ll know that it’s easy to give up the real world in exchange for spending hours and hours of reel exposure. For there are times that real life gets boring and the cinematic world offers a more entertaining alternative.
The thing about being hooked to a series like House is that you relate to characters as if they’re your friends, neighbors, former high school classmates, or even as a magnified version of yourself. It’s hard to not see Jesse Spencer as Dr. Chase after that. Or refer to Lisa Edelstein as Lisa Edelstein and not her character, Dr. Lisa Cuddy. I was and still is fascinated with Robert Sean Leonard’s Dr. James Wilson and the intricate, complicated, eccentric friendship he shared with Dr. Gregory House. The association is inevitable and is neither unexpected nor surprising. The brain has found comfort and familiarity in those characters; permanent fixtures of this brain. Watching 177 45-minute episodes does that you.
I watched the series finale two days before the deadline of a major paper for graduate school. It was not the ending I wanted. But ‘knowing’ House after 7,965 minutes or close to 134 hours of being together night and day and in the wee hours of the morning and the unholy hours of the afternoon, it was an ending that was true to his character.
House is the Sherlock Holmes of the medical world. Wilson is his Dr. John Watson.
*Note on the caricature: The author and granter of this caricature is the Portuguese caricature artist Nelson Santos. User of Flickr as “caricaturas” at this address. For official website, click here.
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The 30-minute Writing Challenge or T30WC is a writing exercise born out of this blogger’s need to maintain a habit of writing. Subjects of each writing challenge is just about anything but should ONLY be written within 30 minutes.
