Legendary jazz musician John Henry Giles checks into Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital believing he's dying from ALS and signs a DNR to avoid a slow death. House disagrees with the diagnosis and goes against everyone's wishes when he violates the DNR to save Giles' life. The decision lands House in court, drives Foreman to consider taking another job, and results in Giles' paralysis worsening. But when the patient inexplicably starts getting better, the team has to figure out the mystery in reverse and find out why his condition is improving.

House has to determine why a young patient has internal bleeding after a car crash. In the meantime, he takes Cuddy's challenge to stop taking Vicodin for a week in exchange for no clinic duty for a month. But the team thinks House's withdrawal symptoms affect his judgment in analyzing the young man's unexplained blood loss.