 He was willing to endure excruciating post-operative pain to retain the use of his leg.After he was put into a chemically induced coma to sleep through the worst of the pain, Stacy, his medical proxy at the time, acted against his wishes and authorized a safer surgical middle-ground procedure between amputation and a bypass by removing just the dead muscle.This resulted in the partial loss of use in his leg, and left House with a lesser, but still serious, level of pain for the rest of his life.