I'm not a big fan of House but I've seen it once or twice.  When they told me my mother had had a stroke, I leapt on a plane and came to SF to try to pick up the pieces. For the first few days she was pretty out of it, but what struck me as pretty darn weird in the middle of all the medical worry, was that she kept hallucinating a big black dog in the room.  "But there is no dog," the nurses kept telling her.  Or was I hallucinating?

We had a big influx of neurologists yesterday, herds of them. My mother, who's making amazing progress, finally looked at one hovering muttering group and said, "Have you people got a new theory or something?"  She wasn't born yesterday, my mother.  Yes, they had a theory.  It wasn't a stroke after all.

There may not have been a dog, but I could definitely see the ghost of Hugh Laurie nipping past out  of the corner of my eye.....