"Here Kitty" is the eighteenth episode of the fifth season of House. It aired on March 16th, 2009.

Plot

Nursing-home worker Morgan fakes an illness to get House's attention after the home's pet cat, Debbie, sleeps next to her. It seems that the cat only visits people if they are about to die and does so with alarming accuracy. While House dismisses Morgan as faking, he is intrigued by her theory on the kiss-of-death cat, and sets out to disprove it. When Morgan falls seriously ill, he and the team are forced to get to the bottom of both mysteries. Ruling out multiple illnesses, House observes Debbie sitting on his warm computer and determines the cat is attracted to warmth. This explains the "death visits", because of the heat coming from the warming blankets on the patients.

House diagnoses Morgan with a tumor of the appendix, interrupting the brain surgery she was about to undergo at the time. After a brief discussion on her willingness to sacrifice all on a crazy suspicion, she remarks that the crazy preacher that House had compared her with previously had many followers, but even after being proven wrong about the second coming again and again, he went on to found the Seventh-day Adventist Church. House states that this was just because his followers were as deluded as the preacher. Morgan simply says, "Maybe he just gave them something to live for." and leaves House pondering her statement.

Meanwhile, Taub struggles with his finances and reconnects with an old high school friend at the clinic whose business successes present Taub with an entrepreneurial opportunity he had not previously considered. Taub decides to pursue this opportunity and tells House of his resignation. At first House refuses it, prompting Taub to ask why. House merely replies "To save you the embarrassment of slinking back here and begging for your job back, which I'll accept after punishing you for being an idiot." Taub leaves, and House calls after him to bring donuts when he comes back the next day. Preparing to invest all his remaining money after a previous financial crisis into his friend's company, Taub arrives for a meeting with him, only to be confronted by a sympathetic secretary 15 minutes later to say that the friend was arrested and was actually a con artist who only worked as a temp at the company. Shocked, he takes his money and leaves. Taub returns to the hospital with the box of donuts he was told to bring back when he returns as per House's prediction and sits resignedly at the table. Debbie the cat then appears on his table.

During the diagnoses of Morgan, House ridicules Kutner about his superstitious nature, and tests him with classics such as the umbrella indoors and walking under a ladder. House goes as far as to fake an illness. Towards the end of the episode, House sits down at his desk to build a toy car track similar to the one he was working on in the opening sequence, only to spring up upon realizing his chair was soaked with urine. House orders Kutner to pay for the dry cleaning and storms out, leading Thirteen to question why Kutner was still alive after a prank like that, and asks how he got a cat to pee on the chair. As he walks out, Kutner replies, "Yeah. A cat", implying that it was he who urinated on House's chair.

Music

• The song that plays at the beginning of the episode is "Stranglehold" by Ted Nugent.

• The song that plays at the end of the episode is "I'm Not Drowning" by Steve Winwood, from the album "Nine Lives."

Episode basis

Debbie, the feline harbinger of death, is based on Oscar, a cat in Rhode Island nursing homes and was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine for predicting deaths.