It's a Wonderful Lie (House)

"It's a Wonderful Lie" is the tenth episode of the fourth season of House and the eightieth episode overall. It aired on January 29, 2008. It is the first episode of the series to feature Olivia Wilde, Kal Penn and Peter Jacobson as main cast members. The plot centers around the Christmas season; the episode's title is a play on the Christmas movie classic It's a Wonderful Life.

House and his team treat a woman, Maggie, who suffers from sudden paralysis of her hands. The paralysis presented as she was belaying and coaching her daughter, Jane, on the rock-climbing wall. The daughter falls and suffers a broken wrist. House probes the patient and her daughter, trying to tease out a lie between them, but both insist that they are always honest with each other. As the team tries to cure the paralysis, Maggie loses her eyesight, and her other organ systems begin to shut down.

Maggie is known to have inherited a mutation of the BRCA1 tumor suppressor gene from her mother, putting her at significantly greater risk of developing certain types of breast cancer. In an effort to avoid these risks, Maggie had an elective prophylactic double-mastectomy. She had no follow-up reconstructive surgery; this additional element of "honesty" further interests House, who despite it stands by his theory that everybody lies.

The team believes Maggie's symptoms might be psychological in origin, but this is proven false when she is discovered to have severe calcification of her entire skeleton, and the lymph nodes in her neck begin to swell and occlude her airway. House and the team conclude that her best hope is a bone marrow transplant, but she will not allow Jane to be tested for a match, despite Jane's protests. House concludes that the only reason someone would refuse that test is if they knew already that the marrow would not be an HLA match, not because "it might hurt a little". Maggie confesses that Jane is the biological child of a drug addict who made her promise never to tell Jane about her true background. House, satisfied that everyone does in fact lie, makes a snide remark about the irony of preferentially keeping promises to drug addicts. In the meantime, Jane goes to the lab to tell the doctors that she does not care what her mother thinks; she wants her bone marrow to be tested anyway.