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Lethal Diagnosis
- 109 statements
- 20 feature instances
- 15 referencing feature instances
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Being diagnosed with an illness is a surefire method for making it suddenly become much worse. Characters who have suffered one or two mild symptoms — such as a cough, fatigue, moments of disorientation, etc. — will visit a doctor or hospital and be told they have some kind of tragic disease, then over the next couple of weeks or sometimes even days, they'll turn into feeble, hacking wrecks who ramble meaninglessly to themselves all day. Often time, the diagnosis is made with a Radiograph of Doom. May be a psychosomatic effect, or may just be the writers cranking the intensity of the symptoms up, now that the cause doesn't have to be kept secret from the audience. Examples |
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La Bohème has a bizarre self-fulfilling diagnosis when Mimi overhears Rodolfo telling a friend that she is dying. | |
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El ChapulÃn Colorado has an episode where this trope is played straight, inverted, subverted and spoofed all the way. A nurse at a hospital is left caring for two bank robbers who were hurt in a shootout with the police. One of them is already out of danger, while the other is not expected to make it past the night. However, when el ChapulÃn shows up, he mixes up the medical records and somehow convinces himself that the dying one is healthy and viceversa, much to everyone's annoyance. As it turns out, he was trying to invoke Your Mind Makes It Real with the dying one, repeating him over and over that he was healthy so he would convince himself that he was healthy so he would get healthy for real. It worked, but unfortunately, the healthy one was repeated so many times that he was dying, he also convinced himself of it and... well you can pretty much guess how well it went for him. | |
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Every episode of House. Every time the team comes up with a tentative theory, the patient's condition instantly escalates... usually with symptoms that don't fit the initial diagnosis. Often, considering House's radical treatments, the treatment itself actually can make them worse — The number of times they give immunosuppressant steroids to people who end up having infections, thinking they have some autoimmune disorder, is amazing. This is Played With in one episode where a woman comes in with a mild cough, which almost immediately is revealed to be a particularly nasty form of lung cancer. Instead of informing the woman of her diagnosis, Cameron insistently denies the results, trying to come up with a less serious explanation. When she finally gives in and informs the woman that she only has weeks to live, she repeats that she just has a cough - and the viewer never sees her again. | |
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Claude Cat in the Looney Tunes short "The Hypochondri-cat" was such a hypochondriac that even mentioning to him that he looked a little green would cause him to instantly turn that color. This reaction was played strictly for humor. | |
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Scrubs: A seemingly-healthy character comes in to the hospital because of a health scare on the news. After he coughs heavily they perform a chest x-ray and it is revealed he has lung cancer and dies within a few days. Lampshaded when one of the doctors questions how he could even be walking around with a disease that bad. Subverted by Ben Sullivan (portrayed by Brendon Fraser)—Dr. Cox's best friend and ex-brother-in-law. In the first episode he was in, he was diagnosed with leukemia. He really didn't show any symptoms beyond an inability for his blood to congeal. In the third episode he's in, a year after his first appearance, he appears healthy but hasn't been seeing his oncologist for some time. Dr. Cox insists he get a workup and restart his treatments, but he dies twenty minutes after Dr. Cox goes off to run some errands for his son's birthday party. |
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This is subverted in Kill la Kill AU, Room 002108, in that Ryuuko was already sick but, when she is hospitalized, the doctors say she has to "stay for tests". Her condition isn't mentioned as to be getting worse as a result of that and neither are her symptoms described. | |
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| Lethal Diagnosis / int_6059ad6b | type |
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In xkcd, Megan is diagnosed with cancer. (Occasionally, Rob is shown to have it, too.) This is because Randall Munroe's Real Life fiancee (now wife) was diagnosed with stage-3 breast cancer not long after they got engaged, despite being in otherwise fairly good health and having no family history of breast cancer. Both Rob and Megan are shown coping with the diagnosis, going through treatment and testing, and trying to make the most of the time they have together as best they can (because they don't know how things will pan out... or if the cancer might one day come back with a vengeance.) | |
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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Odo has been the carrier for the disease destroying his people for a long time without effect. Once this information is revealed, he's deteriorating rapidly within only a few episodes. This is handwaved in-verse with the explanation that the disease gains strength with increased use of shapeshifting and the excessive amount of shapeshifting Odo has had to do over a short space of time has massively escalated his condition. Still, it's only excessive shapeshifting by his standards and it wasn't like he didn't shapeshift prior to them... and it still affects him faster than it affects the rest of his people who shapeshift much more frequently on a long-term basis than he does. It also creates a plot hole, since while those on infiltration duty shift often the vast majority stay in their natural state as much as possible. | |
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| Lethal Diagnosis / int_792fa7f | type |
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In The Little Foxes, Horace is obviously quite sick, but he privately reveals to his wife Regina that won't have very long to live with his heart condition. It's very telling that Regina never shows him any sympathy for this. By the end of the second act, she's saying directly to his face, in cruel honesty, that she hopes he dies soon. | |
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In the movie Brazil, our first view of Mrs. Terrain has her with a few bandages due to a "complication" with treatment to make her look younger. Throughout the course of the movie her condition worsens despite her doctor's insistence that she'll soon be up and about, and in one of the dream sequences we see her coffin, which turns out to contain nothing but bones and something that looks unpleasantly like aspic. | |
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| Lethal Diagnosis / int_90032631 | type |
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Orange Is the New Black: Rosa, who mentions in the first episode she has cancer, is told in the second season that chemotherapy isn't working and she has only weeks left to live. (More specifically, she needs surgery, but the Department of Corrections won't pay for it, and she has no family or friends on the outside who are able and willing to do so.) This is a huge factor in her decision to escape in the second season's final episode. | |
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Finding Neverland - where the reason for Sylvia's coughs is not revealed until late because she kept refusing to get treatment or act like anything was going wrong. | |
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Walt in Gran Torino. Sure, he was Coughing Up Blood anyway, but one gathers he was suffering with that for a long time before he went to see the doctor about it. Walt is never seen to get any worse, however his prognosis is pretty grim, by the way he suddenly tries to reach out to his 'good-for-nothing' son. Oddly, one never sees him deteriorate beyond that gruesome cough, from which he always quickly recovers. Of course, he is gunned down before his condition can kill him. | |
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Exception: In the first few minutes of the new Battlestar Galactica mini series president-to-be Laura Roslin is diagnosed with terminal cancer, but the character proceeds to play a major role in the following TV serial without all the stereotypical signs of disease (and, on the whole, survives a lot longer than most who befall TV illness). | |
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In the Ed, Edd n Eddy episode "A Case of Ed", Edd becomes convinced he has the rare (and presumably deadly) Lackadaisycathro Disease, and almost immediately becomes pallid and feverish. | |
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Parodied in South Park; in "Bloody Mary", upon being told that his alcoholism is a disease, Stan's father shaves his head, confines himself to a wheelchair, and speaks exclusively in a harsh whisper. | |
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Joyce Summers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who went from mild headaches to violent dementia in just a few episodes. Can be Truth in Television. Plenty of people never even manage to get the diagnosis before they lose it. | |
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In one episode of Hey Arnold!, Helga is bit by a monkey and notices some redness in the area. She looks up a book on archaic diseases and becomes convinced that she has contracted a terminal, monkey-borne disease. Other symptoms include sweaty hands (which she develops out of fear of death), irritability (practically her defining character trait), and loss of appetite (impending death tends to make one less apt to enjoy a meal). | |
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Trauma Center (Atlus) has the diagnosis episodes. Redoing the diagnosis as new symptoms show up is even part of the gameplay. | |
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The entire basis behind Breaking Bad is Walter's diagnosis with cancer, which begins his downward spiral. This is played with later on when Walt starts developing some nasty symptoms and his doctor tells him that his cancer is actually gone into remission and he is just experiencing delayed side effects of the treatments. By the end of the series, Walt's cancer is back and his condition has seriously deteriorated but that can be attributed to him living as a fugitive in isolation for months and not getting proper medical treatment. | |
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