Drew Lemayne

Drew Lemayne was the dead boy House was obsessed with diagnosing in the Season 8 episode Dead & Buried. He is unseen except for a short time when his body is shown. He was the son of Emory Lemayne and Mickey Lemayne Darro.
==Case History==
At about the age of 3, Drew was asymptomatic, but his kidneys started failing and within a year they had totally failed. They gave him transfusions, but he eventually suffered lung failure as well. He died at the age of 4. Three internists and a department chair at Johns Hopkins Medical School worked on the case, but could not find a diagnosis. The death of Drew resulted in the divorce of his parents.
However, five years later, Drew’s father Emory met Dr. Gregory House at their anger management therapy group. Dr. House became intrigued with the case. He thought it might have been lupus or Berger’s disease and asked Emory if Drew ever had a rash, but Emory told him he didn‘t. Emory also denied Drew had ever been sensitive to sunlight and never had cold extremities. This led Dr. House to believe that Drew may have been suffering from granulomatosis with polyangiitis. He asked Emory if he and his wife would agree to an exhumation order. Emory said his ex-wife would never agree, but agreed to tell Dr. House where Drew’s body was interred.
Dr. House examined Drew’s body looking for a hole in the cartilage of his nose. However, the cartilage was intact. However, he noticed Mees’ lines in Drew’s fingernails. This indicated heavy metal poisoning. As such, he arranged to do an environmental scan of the wife’s home, which used to be the family home. He got Emory to help. He collected samples of wood, water and children’s toys. However, the tests for lead, mercury and arsenic were all negative. Emory started telling Dr. House how Drew often mispronounced words and his nickname was “Deezer” because he couldn’t say “Zebra”. He also told Dr. House that his wife didn’t seem to have any emotional response to their son’s death.
On a pretext of getting a flu shot, Dr. House managed to get Mickey to come to the clinic. Because of her lack of emotion when Drew died, he suspected that she might have apathetic hyperthyroidism, a genetic condition she may have passed on to Drew. However, when he insulted her about her lack of response to her son’s death, she slapped him. Dr. House apologized for his deception, and Mickey explained that when Drew died, Emory went to pieces and she promised herself she wouldn‘t let the same thing happen to her. However, she also admitted she left Emory not due to his emotional breakdown, but because her ex-husband’s eyes reminded her too much of their dead son. Dr. House asked if someone used to babysit Drew. Mickey told him her father used to, and that Drew spent a lot of time at his place. However, she said her father was also very upset about the death and warned Dr. House not to approach him about it.
However, on the pretext of being from the coroner’s office, Dr. House went to see Mickey’s father. He asked what Drew did when he was there. The grandfather said they mostly watched television and ate biscuits. He denied that Drew used sidewalk chalk or finger paints. However, Mickey arrived with her husband, who punched Dr. House.
Dr. House went to Dr. Wilson, who refused to help. However, Dr. Wilson made a comment about “deaf ears”. Dr. House remembered that Drew had trouble pronouncing certain words, and that the grandfather had trouble hearing him at times.
To test his theory, Dr. House found Emory and they went to Mickey’s house again and found her new son playing in the yard. Using a tuning fork, he determined that the son had no hearing in the high frequency ranges. When Mickey came to confront him, he told her the kidney failure, lung failure, Mees’ lines and deafness indicated Alport syndrome. Mickey denied that Drew was deaf, but Dr. House told her that Drew’s habit of mispronouncing words showed that he too had trouble hearing sounds in the high frequency ranges. When Mickey’s husband came out to confront Dr. House, he made it clear that the condition was genetic and that she, her father and her new son had it too. In the father, it merely caused difficulty hearing, and she was most likely asymptomatic. However, her new son could also die unless he was screened and treated. Mickey started crying and admitted to Emory that she missed Drew as well.
Category:Deceased Characters
Category:Patients
Category:Males
Category:Characters
Category:Season 8