Patient #1 has a fever of one hundred and two, earning him a trip to the second floor, because if you're going to catch a virulent form of an already fatal disease, you might as well get a little bit of view as a consolation prize. The patient strolls away, not seeming at all upset about his possible future as a bloody-eared corpse.

Wilson's patient fares better, getting a clean bill of health that entitles her to two red pills and one blue "I'm healthy, let me out of here before I actually do catch meningitis!" slip.

House's next patient is meningitis-free, so she gets a special bonus insta-diagnosis that her mischievous teenage daughter has been borrowing her clothes to look older and sneak into bars. House figures all this out because of an old stain on the woman's otherwise freshly dry-cleaned clothes, and he's totally wrong. The annoyed woman says she doesn't have a daughter. This just leaves her with Option #2, which was House's little joke about her husband being a secret cross-dresser. Whoops, but I think we all could have seen this coming. Ain't no way a rebellious teenage girl is going to borrow her mother's clothes, no matter how many bars it will get her into.

Chase's patient has also been assigned to the second floor, and he takes the news a bit more realistically, with a slight freak-out that he's going to die. Chase sends him off on his way.

Amazin' divin' Mary is House's next patient, and she has all three tell-tale symptoms of meningitis: a fever, a rash, and a sore neck. Mary thinks the latter two symptoms are due to a new bathing suit and a pulled muscle, but House gets ready to send her off to the second floor anyway. He writes in his pad, and Mary cranes her neck to see if he's talking any shit about her. Mary's strict diving training regimen apparently leaves her no time to hear any of the five million jokes out there about doctors and their illegible handwriting. But something gets House's attention, and he asks her to shake her head from side-to-side and then nod it up and down. Side-to-side hurts; up and down doesn't. As we'll learn later, young Mary's "no" head-shaking neck muscles don't get used a whole lot, which could explain their stiffness.