History Main / LittlestCancerPatient

* ''VideoGame/TraumaCenter Second Opinion'' has Tyler's younger sister who is afflicted by a rare disease caused by the GUILT, as parodied by the ''WebAnimation/AwesomeSeries''.

-- "[[WebAnimation/AwesomeSeries Awesome Center: Under the Awesome]]"

** ''Amazing Spider-Man #248: "The Kid Who Collects Spider-Man"'', features one of these. The story itself was re-written and adapted for an episode of ''WesternAnimation/SpiderManTheAnimatedSeries''.
** ''Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man'' #5 has Spider-Man visit a children's cancer ward, playing make-believe with the patients.
* Yes, one showed up in ''ComicBook/{{Empowered}}''. Yes, the title character gets sent over by the local "Make-A-Wish" people. Yes, he always wanted to be a supervillain. [[spoiler:Yes, he actually becomes one.]]
* The entire plot of a [[ComicBook/ChickTracts Jack Chick]] tract called "The Little Princess". Heidi is dying of an unknown disease but manages to go out for Halloween one last time, connected to an oxygen tank. After meeting the new neighbors, who give her a tract, she is converted to Christianity along with her family.
* ''ComicBook/{{Transmetropolitan}}'' has like twenty of these, including a kid who's being used as a growth bed for cancer-preventing genetic plug-ins (guess how that works), a kid who has to pawn off her doll for appetite reducing medication, a kid with mutated necrotizing fasciitis, a kid being sexually abused by her older brother and several child prostitutes. There's even "victimbots" in the shape of sad children released into crowds to make disasters more tragic and TV-friendly. By the way, most of these kids are used to illustrate just what a CrapsackWorld The City is and don't really get much better. The child prostitute one is particularly jarring because the issue makes very clear that these kids are already broken, on a fundamental level, and nobody will be able to give them the help they need because it's already too late.

* During a run of ''ComicBook/{{Thunderbolts}}'', Dr. Chen Lu, the Radioactive Man, poisons some Atlantean Terrorists due to their recent attacks on China, with the intent of punishing all Atlanteans for their actions, which naturally leads to some tension between Atlantis and the surface world. When Namor invites the whole team to Atlantis to show the damage Chen Lu has caused and persuade him to undo the damage, he carries a dying Atlantean child in his arms and asks if "they would allow this child to die". Chen Lu dryly thinks to himself that Namor is "playing what the Americans call 'the child card'."

* Subverted in Tom Clancy's ''Literature/RainbowSix''. Terrorists taking over a Spanish theme park take a group of tourists hostage, including a contingent of terminally ill children, one of whom is the very incarnation of the trope, the little girl cancer patient in a wheelchair who's just so damned "nice". Then when their demands are refused, [[MoralEventHorizon they shoot her in the back and leave her corpse to wheel out the front gate, still in the wheelchair.]] Needless to say, while the other terrorists are taken out quickly and cleanly, the executioner receives a rifle bullet to the spleen (courtesy of the sniper who watched him kill the LCP) [[AssholeVictim An extremely slow]] [[LaserGuidedKarma and painful death follows.]] To be fair, the squad's leader (Ding Chavez) [[WhatTheHellHero makes his displeasure known to the sniper after the mission]]... [[PayEvilUntoEvil but no one]] ''really'' is displeased.

* In many interpretations of the [[Fanfic/CulDeSac Ed Edd n Eddy theory]], Jimmy is the last of the mortal children to die because of succumbing to cancer in the early 2000s.

* ''Manga/GunslingerGirl''. The Social Welfare Agency ostensibly rehabilitates female children who have been disabled or traumatized due to disease or criminal atrocities. In truth they are reconditioned as brainwashed cyborg assassins for the Italian government. This trope is used to recruit {{The Handler}}s of these girls; they're shown a little girl in a hospital bed who has lost everything, and told they can give her a second chance at life. In truth the conditioning shortens their lifespan, but by the time that sinks in their handler feels too morally compromised to refuse, which would mean abandoning the girl anyway as she can't be reconditioned to another handler.

* The Kevin Costner film ''Film/{{Dragonfly}}'' has several of these. The drawings they churn out illustrating their nearly-identical dreams border on RoomFullOfCrazy, but Costner tracks down the symbols to realize the kids aren't just hallucinating on meds.

** House shows little sympathy towards his Littlest Cancer Patient and is cynical about everyone else's reactions. Of course, that's the point of the character. It should also be noted that this episode provided some good mockery of Chase when [[spoiler:the twelve-year-old girl talked him into kissing her.]] However, House was substantially nicer to her (at least to her face) than most of his patients, and when she explained to him why she didn't want to die yet by asking, "Who would take care of Mom?" he looked the closest he's ever come on the show to crying. A bit of a case of using the trope for a [[PetTheDog Pet the Dog moment]] - it showed that House is human after all. He just refuses to patronize the kids by treating them any differently because of their illness, which probably stems from his own experience with being disabled.

* ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog'' has Maria, a young girl suffering from a fictional auto-immune disease called [=NIDS=]. [[UltimateLifeform Shadow]] was created to help find a cure for her. Shadow and Maria became LikeBrotherAndSister and [[spoiler:during the GUN-raid, Maria was shot and killed while helping Shadow escape to Earth]].

* A surprisingly well-done and heartbreaking case in the ''Manga/ShadowStar'' manga, [[spoiler:ActionMom Jane Franklin teams up with Shiina to rescue her son Robert, the LCP of the story, who is also a Dragon Bearer, and who's been kidnapped by the Japanese government so they can use him for their purposes. The child even dies in her arms peacefully after they rescue him.]]

* ''Franchise/SpiderMan'':

* ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'':
** In ''[[ComicBook/Supergirl2005 2008]]'' storyline ''ComicBook/WayOfTheWorld'', ComicBook/{{Supergirl}} tries to save Thomas Price, a little boy who suffers from terminal cancer. She goes so far to promise she will cure him. Subverted because she ''fails''.

* The Series/TheKidsInTheHall movie ''[[Film/KidsInTheHallBrainCandy Brain Candy]]'' featured Cancer Boy, a tragically afflicted child who was played for laughs. His inclusion in the film was one reason why it was buried by the studio.
** He also appeared in one of the sketches [[ExecutiveMeddling "they wouldn't let us show"]] in the series finale.
* Played completely straight in ''Film/TheDayAfterTomorrow''.
** Figuring out what happens to him after the total destruction of all medical infrastructure in the US will be an exercise left to the viewer.
* Subverted in ''Film/{{Quarantine}}'', where the sick little girl who fits most of the markers of this trope has TheVirus. "It's just bronchitis!" screams her mom, right before being messily devoured.

* Music/MysteryJets' "Little Bag of Hair" is a painful {{Deconstruction}} of the trope based on the experience of the band's lead singer-songwriter, Blaine Harrison: Harrison was born with the condition spina bifida, which while not terminal with modern medicine still requires extensive and painful hospitalisation and surgery to manage during childhood. The song is an intensely autobiographical reflection on how none of this gave him any particular wisdom, insight, or strength of character; the disease and its treatments were merely something to be endured with flights of fancy and morphine.

[[caption-width-right:350:[-Art by @/{{Noaqiyeum}}.]]-]

[[caption-width-right:350:[-Art by Tropers/Noaqiyeum.]]-]

[[caption-width-right:[-Art by Tropers/Noaqiyeum.]]-]

%% Image credit: Tropers/Noaqiyeum

%% Image Pickin' thread did not produce a new image: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1593064094028611800

[[quoteright:320:[[Film/TheDayAfterTomorrow https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/CancerBoy.gif]]]]
[[caption-width-right:320:Even worldwide climate collapse is powerless to kill him.]]

* Ms. Green's infant son is this in ''Webcomic/AwfulHospital''.

* Played completely straight in ''Film/TheDayAfterTomorrow'' (pictured above).

A particularly risky form of TheWoobie, which is much more likely ([[Administrivia/TropesAreTools though not certain]]) to fail than be successful with the audience. The Littlest Cancer Patient, as you may have guessed from the title, is a small child, rarely over the age of nine, with some form of terminal disease - although they may be in recovery. Cancer couldn't kill them, and neither can a small apocalypse. This character's sole [[RuleOfEmpathy reason]] for existence is to [[{{Glurge}} tug your heartstrings so hard]] they're torn from your chest.

* A Littlest Cancer Patient died in "Angels and Blimps", an episode of ''[[Series/AllyMcBeal Ally [=McBeal=]]]'', but he was played by Haley Joel Osment, so it wasn't really that sad. He was a tough lil' guy who decided to sue God and thought Ling was his Guardian Angel.

** Viciously subverted in the episode "Believers" as part of Creator/JMichaelStraczynski's personal war on (former trope) "Cute Kids And Robots": when an alien family's religious beliefs forbid surgery on their critically ill son, Dr. Franklin goes ahead and performs it anyway -- only to have the family [[BlueAndOrangeMorality calmly and ritually kill the boy]] afterward because according to their beliefs opening his body up allowed his spirit to leave it.
** And in the second season episode "Confessions and Lamentations", where a whole race has a terminal disease and Delenn encourages a small child to believe everything will be all right. Dr. Franklin [[HopeSpot finds the cure]] and dramatically bursts in on the quarantine zone... to find it full of cute little corpses. The epilogue includes a newscast mentioning that the plague wiped out ''the entire race'', and, indeed, that type of alien is [[ContinuityNod never seen again in the series.]] There were [[http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/guide/040.html comments on set]] about holding a mass burial for the race's prosthetics. They even later blow up the Jump Gate to that race's star system, since nobody (except pirates and raiders [[PlanetLooters coming to loot]] the [[GhostPlanet now uninhabited world]]) is using it anyway...

* Subverted in the ''Series/{{Supernatural}}'' episode "Appointment in Samarra". When Death challenges Dean to act as a Reaper for one day in exchange for freeing Sam's soul from Lucifer's cage, he initially refuses to kill the LittlestCancerPatient, resulting in her miraculous recovery. Due to this, however, a nurse who was attending her goes home early and is killed in a car crash she would not have otherwise been in. Another Reaper, Tessa, explains that this is because the girl's survival goes against the natural order, and is changing people's destinies as a result. Dean is eventually forced to throw the bet in order to save the nurse's husband from a similar death. Even though he's lost, he decides to go back and reap the little girl to set the natural order straight. Luckily for him, this was a SecretTestOfCharacter and Death decides to restore Sam's soul anyway.
* In the ''Series/{{Torchwood}}'' episode "Dead Man Walking," Owen has a PetTheDog moment with the Littlest Leukemia Patient, who explicitly states that he's gonna die anyway and doesn't want the second shot of chemo the mean old doctors are giving him. Owen then goes on to save the kid, denying him the chance to die with his eyebrows intact by wrestling with Death himself. Way to go, Owen.

* ''VideoGame/MegaManBattleNetwork 3'' had Mamoru, the Littlest Heart Disease Patient as part of an arc. In a bit of a subversion, [[spoiler:it's implied that he is actually in control of the BonusBoss, Serenade.EXE - the only other character that can match [[PsychoForHire Bass.EXE]], [[TheRival Protoman.EXE]], and [[TheHero MegaMan.exe]].]]

->'''EMT:''' Ma’am? Did someone order an ambulance for The Littlest Cancer Patient?\\

* Subverted in an episode of ''Anime/MonsterRancher'', where GentleGiant Golem meets a young IllGirl with a terminal illness and enters a combat tournament to raise money for her treatment. Turns out she and her father are con artists, and in a further subversion, they even get away with it. (Though she at least mentions to her father that she thinks they should retire as they leave.)

See also SoapOperaDisease, VictorianNovelDisease, IllGirl, InspirationallyDisadvantaged.