I hate to admit it, but I'm one of the many who sought out this episode after Jennifer Stone became famous from "Wizards of Waverly Place." As for the show itself, I always saw the rapid-fire insults of Dr. Gregory House as something that looked funnier in the promos than the actual series is. I still do, but that doesn't mean I hate it. After checking out a few or several episodes and missing this one, I finally got to see it.
This episode is hardly kiddie-fare. It's not supposed to be, and none of them are anyway. Stone plays Jessica Simms, an obese 10-year-old girl who suffers a non-fatal heart attack during gym. Any reasonable person would conclude that this girl simply ate too much junk food, and is paying the price for it, but this isn't the case. Her mother wants House and his staff to consider another cause besides her weight. They do, and it doesn't work the first two times. During one procedure, she become impatient when she gets too thirsty and freaks out. In another she develops huge bleeding scars on her body out of nowhere. Because she is 10 years old, she's worried about her prospects involving friends, boys, etc., and eventually reveals that she had been stealing diet pills. Finally the staff concludes that the only treatment available for this poor girl might be a double mastectomy before she's even old enough to have breasts... or is it? Another one of House's patients who appears to have put on some extra weight is a middle-aged woman with a massive tumor in her torso who fears that if she has surgery she'll have a huge scar, and her husband will leave her for another woman. The doc handles the crisis in his usual crass manner that we all love. All this happens while the hospital board tries to force House to fire some members of his staff.
This wasn't the only non-kid-friendly role Stone was in. In an episode of "Without a Trace," she had a brief role as a girl who was brought to a sex-abuse party by some dirty old men who had an encounter with a missing girl. Unlike that role, she was the main subject here, and is certainly a surprise for anybody who knows her as the happy-go-lucky, fashion-eccentric sidekick she plays today.