Talk:Wilson's Heart (House)

Just a few points; I might make these edits later:

- It's Huntington's Chorea, not "Cholera." - If I understood correctly, Amber couldn't filter the pills b/c of the kidney damage in the accident, not because it was a particularly high dosage. I might be wrong, though.

Scot0127 (talk) 03:40, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

No, you're correct. The drug she was on was Amantadine, which is an antiviral (with antiparkinsonic properties to boot) that has some particularly toxic side-effects if mis-used, or in Ambers case, if left in the body instead of being metabolized and filtered out. The reason the dialysis would have been pointless is because, like House stated, it bonds with protein. Kidneys could take care of that, but a dialysis machine can't as it's only a crude filter by comparison, designed as a stop-gap in the case of renal disease or renal failure. She "overdosed" not by taking too many, but by virtue of the drug hanging around and not exiting her system. And with the amount of organ damage she'd sustained as a result of the crash AND as a result of the toxicity of the drug, she wouldn't have been able to get any transplants. 124.148.41.66 (talk) 11:14, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

This is probably nothing, but there is a bit of symmetry with the end of last season, when House turns off the blood filtration machine, the woman's heart is still beating, and here Amber dies. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.201.176.194 (talk) 06:18, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

That's not a "blood filtration machine", that's a cardiopulmonary bypass machine. Essentially, her heart is no longer working correctly, so they are pumping the blood through a series of chambers designed to "scrub" the CO2 from her venous blood, oxygenate it, and then shunt it back into her arteries. Quite a nifty machine, but as with all mechanical substitutes for natural organs, woefully inefficient. They use them in things like bypass surgery and transplantation. 124.148.41.66 (talk) 11:36, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Made a minor edit. The article mentioned they analyzed Amber's "EKG" to determine the disease had spread to her brain. That was incorrect - an EKG/ECG measures electrical activity in the cardiac muscle. The actual (correct) diagnostic readout they analyzed was her EEG which measures electrical activity in the brain. I also added the correct reason House entered a coma - cerebral haemmorhage caused by a widening skull fracture, indirectly caused by a complex partial seizure. I changed the wording of "undergoes a ventricular fibrillation" to "suffers a..." as the original wording made it sound more like a diagnostic procedure than an actual serious medical problem. Someone had also referred to amantadine as a symptomatic relief or palliative treatment, when in reality it's an antiviral drug, designed to help fight the infection itself. Paracetamol/acetaminophen, tea and bedrest would be symptomatic relief. So I amended that as well. 124.148.41.66 (talk) 11:28, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Ugh. On further inspection there's a heap of grammatical errors, as well as some very awkward wording. I'm not in the mood to go through and edit all the faults out. If someone else can do that, but leave my factual edits intact, that'd be much appreciated. 124.148.41.66 (talk) 11:47, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I am just wondering why they couldn't give Amber other plasma-binding drugs to compitatively expell the amantadine from its bond to the albumin. This is done in other cases of poisoning as well. The other way would be giving drugs that antagonize the effects of the amantadine until it has been eliminated. --131.220.136.195 (talk) 12:13, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

She was in multiple systems failure by the time they discovered the amantadine. She didn't have any systems running that could have metabolized or eliminated the toxins. Adding more medications to that may have just increased the toxic effect on her system. Plus, it made for a much more dramatic storyline if she died :P 124.148.41.66 (talk) 12:21, 20 May 2008 (UTC)