Tuesday, March 17, 2009

The House - Green Urine

One of the episodes of House has Green Urine. It starts with the entry of Morgan who is 35 years old nurse in a nursing home, she visits the House to complain about her colds and bad conditions she notices often. She is asked to take some tests, but she suffers a tonic-clonic seizure and becomes incontinent of green urine and she is admitted to the House.

The House team diagnosis consisted of some infection like Pseudomonas or toxin exposure. Taub and Kutner are sent to search in Morgan’s office and they found a bottle of methylthionium chloride which is a kind of medicine that causes green urine. Taub expects Morgan to have a Munchausen’s Syndrome and explains the symptoms, but the house House drive him off on a fool’s task.

House now goes to see the Morgan and pretends to induce a photosensitivite seizure. He catches her faking a seizure and she realizes it. She admits that her symptoms were fake, but insists that she is really sick. She knows that she is sick because Debbie the nursing home cat came to sleep beside her. Debbie has a reputation for only sleeping next to people who are dying, so now Morgan is certain that she is at death’s door. House is unimpressed, but then she collapses outside his office, wheezing. Foreman declares that she has bronchospasm, which both House and Foreman agree cannot be faked.

The differential now consists of bronchitis, emphysema, or visceral larva migrans (infection with intestinal worms from the cat). House suspects the latter and has the team perform a bronchoscopy (looking down the lungs with a flexible fiberoptic camera) to find any worms. The test is negative, and so now the team considers acid reflux, allergic asthma, or a panic attack. House thinks the allergy idea is the most likely, so orders a methacholine challenge (a test which provokes asthma is the patient is asthmatic). The challenge test is negative, so Cuddy tells House the he has to discharge Morgan. He takes her out to the smoking area to talk about the dissolution of her marriage and death of her step-son. While there, he notices a rash and she begins to wheeze again. He has another nearby doctor diagnose her with bronchospasm then wheels her back into the hospital. He thinks she has Churg-Strauss Syndrome (a type of vasculitis more common in people with asthma) so starts her on steroids. Morgan now develops brown urine, but there is no evidence of kidney failure, liver failure, an intestinal fistula (an abnormal connection between the intestine and bladder), or blood in the urine. Foreman suggests that the urine only looks brown because it still has traces of green dye and something is making it purple, and purple + green = brown. House thinks this means she may have a Strep bovis infection from colon cancer (about 15% of colon cancers have a concurrent S. bovis infection. The exact relationship between the two is unclear). The team reminds him that her colonoscopy was normal. He orders a pill-cam (capsule endoscopy), which is also negative for cancer.

Kutner suggest that Morgan may have a skin cancer which has spread to her colon. House has him check her over for melanomas. He finds no skin cancers, but does find prominent spider veins on her back which weren’t there before. House now determines that she has Cushing’s Syndrome (Cushing’s is caused by elevated levels of cortisol in the body. This is most commonly caused by high levels of ACTH, a chemical that tells the body to make more cortisol. ACTH-secreting tumors can most commonly be found in the pituitary gland — part of the brain — or the adrenal glands near the kidneys. House is trying to determine which is the source of the ACTH.) An MRI is negative for a tumor in the adrenals or brain, and blood levels of ACTH are equivocal, so House wants Chase to sample the blood from within her brain to see if there are high levels of ACTH there. The surgery is completed, and Morgan is found to have slightly elevated levels of ACTH in her brain. Incidentally, she also suffered a cardiac arrest while in the operating room. House decides that the cause of her Cushing’s Syndrome is an ACTH secreting tumor in the pituitary. The symptoms can be controlled with medication, but surgery can correct the problem permanently. Chase tries to dissuade her from the surgery, but she decides to have it anyway.

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