If House hallucinated in "No Reason", after being shot, did he hallucinate during that minute he was 'dead' during the cardiac arrest while recovering from the infarction?

I know dead and nearly dead are hardly the same thing but I still question what House saw during that minute. Seems pretty improbable that he saw what he told the class in "Three Stories" since at the time of the infarction he had not even met those patients yet.

The reason I'm questioning it is because it seems that this time ("No Reason") he told at least Wilson something about what he had hallucinated about. It doesn't seem that way with the "Three Stories" vision. I also wondered because of the comment he makes to Ezra Powell in "Informed Consent" about there being nothing.

What is he hiding?What did he see that he felt he couldn't share with anyone? Or did he not see anything and that scared hell out of him?

I guess I've hung up on a serious train of thought because we don't know what House was like before the infarction. We can guess and several people have alluded to the fact that he wasn't a ball of sunshine before and that he was "pretty much the same", but "pretty much the same" is not the same.

At the end of "No Reason", House has made some decisions, big decisions regarding what his life is about and how he wants to live it. Although I don't think we can change our core being, I do think we can garner a better understand of how to deal with who we are and how we live our lives.

So what happened in "Three Stories"? What did House learn? How did he change and was that change part of what Wilson refered to in "Detox" as well as his comments on the roof in "Need to Know" ("You don't like yourself but you do admire yourself")?

I'm beginning to wonder if House wasn't as quite as bad as we're led to believe he was before the infarction. That his minute elsewhere changed him. I don't have the transcript from Detox but the line about being miserable and afraid to face himself. I think there has been change and maybe this hallucination in "No Reason" was a push back to where he was before the infarction. Again, not happy Mr. Sunshine but not quite so miserable. And believe me, this is not to say it's all about the leg but more about what went on in his head while he wasn't there, or here as it were.

What was he like before and did the infarction change him other than the obvious mobility issues and pain? How and Why? And why the change after "No Reason"? Is is just hte leg? Too many other things indicate that it wasn't but...

Damn it, I need answers!!!! :angry:

;) :lol:

Sorry, rt, I can only give you one answer right now... :) Have to think about the rest when the brain cells have come back from the weekend. ;)

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Wilson: You made it a week.
House: And won my prize.
Wilson: Congratulations.
House: Cuddy's a sucker. I woulda done it for two weeks off.
Wilson: Yeah, it was a piece o' cake. Learn anything?
House: Yeah. I'm an addict.
Wilson: Uh... okay.
House: I'm not stopping.
Wilson: ...There are programs. Cuddy would give you the time. You could get on a different pain management regimen...
House: I don't need to stop.
Wilson: You just said--
House: I said I was an addict, I didn't say I had a problem. I pay my bills, I make my meals, I function.
Wilson: That all you want? ...You have no relationships.
House: I don't want any relationships.
Wilson: You alienate people.
House: I've been alienating people since I was three.
Wilson: Oh, come on! Drop it! You don't think you've changed in the last few years?
House: Of course I have. I've gotten older, my hair's gotten thinner, sometimes I'm bored, sometimes I'm lonely, sometimes I wonder what it all means.
Wilson: No, I was there! You are not just a regular guy who's getting older. You've changed! You're miserable and you're afraid to face yourself--
House: (bangs his cane on heater) Of course I've changed!
Wilson: ...And everything's the leg? Nothing's the pills? They haven't done a thing to you?
House: They let me do my job, and they take away my pain.

But yet... in Cane & Able, Wilson seems to think that the limited time that House is healthy MAY enable him to change. Does mean that he thinks that House has always been this way? Or does he believe that somehow House will realize how he's been acting and suddenly wake up (pain free) and change his ways for good?

But if Wilson thinks that the pain is coming back.... then why bother? If its the pain that has made him miserable, the pain that made him who he is, why try to change him if the pain will just be back (thus making him miserable again).

Wilson, as much as I love him, needs to make up his mind. Is the pain real... is it not? Is he House's buddy or his conscience? He's a flip-floppy kind of guy... not to say that couldn't happen in reality... but he frustrates me sometimes. Hmmm... back to the grind... <_<

I'm quite sure House saw something during the time he was dead during the flashbacks in "Three Stories". I doubt very much it was what we were shown during that time although I have a strange yen to write a fic where that is exactly what he did see.

It's very strange that he won't tell Wilson what he saw my theory is that maybe it was something that really scared him, or unnerved him in some way. My long unfinished fic covers one scenario in my mind. I've covered the part where he was really clinically dead, but I plan to eventually write more visions he had during the time he was ill--on the principle that while that he was only technically dead once, but that being as close to death as he was the door so to speak was still open.

It's strange I actually plan to probably do several fics on the subject (it may end up as a very long Five Things House Did (Didn't) See While He Was Dead), but enough about me. I do find it interesting that the near death experience is one area that hasn't acquired a lot of speculation. I guess maybe because it touches on religion/spirituality and it's easy for those discussions to devolve from what might have happened/what he might have saw into an argument over whose belief about the existence of an afterlife and the nature of that afterlife is right.

As far as House's statement to Ezra about there being nothing on the "other side" as a statement of House's personal belief on the subject rather than anything he did or didn't see when he was technically dead. I can't be bothered to look up the exact quote but in Three Stories House says something to the effect of: some people see white lights and feel a presence, I believe it's just a side effect of the process of the brain shutting down. So, in essence House may have had some kind of near death experience, but in his mind it's not proof of the existence of an afterlife or a glimpse of what that afterlife might be like but simple a chemical reaction related to oxygen deprivation and dying brain cells.

On the question of House changing I take the middle ground. On one hand I think House has always been a sarcastic, brilliant, loner type who frequently rubbed people the wrong way, but I think he may have been a little less extreme in it than he was. There was still a lot of self-hatred there, but maybe a little more trust--after all Stacy ask him why he doesn't think he deserves to live, which makes me wonder. House doesn't see himself as having changed since maybe he's always been that way on the inside/in his own view of himself, but it's possible that he went to more effort to keep the mask in place before.

I don't think House in Meaning is neccessarily House pre-infarction though. I think the attempt at more obvious empathy/niceness is something he hasnt' tried before, but the whole vision shook him up a little and he wondered if changing his M.O. might help.

Of course we know little about how much House told Wilson about the vision. He may have just said that it made him reconsider a few things and not neccessarily given him a play-by-play. From what we've seen Wilson obviously is shocked by the turn in House's personality and he probably asked him what was up with the new attitude. And no matter who you are, nearly dying sort of gets your attention.

For some reason I don 't think House really learned a whole lot from the near-death thing, or at least not as much as he learned from the experience of surviving the infarction. Why I don't know. Of course since House doesn't think that near death experiences are anything of significance (like dreams it's garbage in/garbage out with common feature due chemistry) it may be he wouldn't have taken any revelations that seriously or else he forgot in the general fog of what he was going through.

Then again, maybe he did change but only briefly. He did say something about the euphoria/glad to be alive thing only lasting two months(?) to Foreman in Forever. Might he have been speaking from experience in that he changed for a while, but didn't maintain it?