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Littlest Cancer Patient

Even worldwide climate collapse is powerless to kill him.

I can pretty much make anybody cry just by showing them this drawing I invented of a one-legged puppy named "Li'l Brudder."
—Strong Bad

A particularly risky form of The Woobie, which is much more likely 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 twelve, with some form of terminal disease. This character's sole reason for existence is to tug your heartstrings so hard they're torn from your chest.

The Littlest Cancer Patient has a rather specific form of Contractual Immortality. They may find themselves on a plane that gets hijacked by terrorists, menaced by the Monster Of The Week, in the path of a huge tidal wave, or in any form of danger. But rest assured — the only thing allowed to kill them is their illness. And that will rarely happen in the course of the story unless the writer(s) really wanna punch you in the gut.

Occasionally, the Littlest Cancer Patient is used to give a Pet The Dog moment to The Big Guy, The Lancer, or sometimes even a Dirty Coward. Another common use is for an athlete to swear to win a game or match for the sake of this poor, sick child, never taking to mind the possible repercussions if they failed to do this. Nowadays, though, you can expect cruel subversion for that. (Hilarious subversions work too.◊)

The name of this trope is a reference to The Day After Tomorrow in Fifteen Minutes, by Cleolinda Jones, which uses the phrase to great hilarity.

Compare Ill Girl, Morality Pet, and Too Good For This Sinful Earth. Often the target of Kids Are Cruel.

Examples

Anime and Manga
  • Subverted in an episode of Monster Rancher, where Gentle Giant Golem meets a young Ill Girl 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.
    • "Golem wanted girl to get better. Girl is better. Golem happy."
  • Played very straight in the second season of Vandread. Poor Shirley!
  • Ojamajo Doremi Naisho's twelfth episode had a leukemia patient, Nozomi or "Non-chan", who lived out her dream of becoming a witch for a day thanks to the girls, but died before the Witch World could make it a reality in the future a day later. There was a patient younger than her who was allowed to go out of the hospital in the end though.
  • This is the primary basis for Full Moon O Sagashite, where the main character is a child with a year to live who desperately wants to sing.
  • In a filler arc of Naruto, a group of Genin from the Hidden Star village use a special meteorite to train, which amplifies their chakra but puts a great strain on their bodies. The youngest of these is one of the unfortunate ones whose body cannot handle the strain, and after looking at his damaged chakra network with his Byakugan, Neji states that the boy doesn't have long to live. It doesn't need to be said that he makes a full recovery, right? Hooray for Tsunade.
  • Sort of a subversion/inversion/I'm not really sure: A Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex episode dealt with a young, gifted mecha designer who was dying of cancer (presumably; something that caused his hair to fall out at any rate) and could only be saved by a complete body transplant, which his parents refused to allow due to religious reasons. He somehow transferred his mind into his latest giant mecha tank and rode it all the way to his parents' house. The Major destroyed the tank and its creator at the last second, but wondered whether the man's real motivation was revenge against his parents or just showing off his last creation.
  • A surprisingly well-done and heartbreaking case in the Naru Taru manga, Action Mom 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.
  • Hayate in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's. That the villains were doing what they did because they thought it would save her life placed them in the Hero Antagonist side of the morality scale.
  • The Cute Shotaro Boy from the seventh and eighth volumes of CLAMP's Tokyo Babylon qualifies, although he has a rare kidney disease rather than cancer. Not only does he rack up massive Moe points with the audience, he's also the indirect cause of Seishirou's eye being destroyed, as his mother went batshit crazy and tried to tear the Subaru's kidney out, and instead ended up gouging his Seishirou's eye out right in front of him... resulting in even more angst and woe.
  • There's one episode of Van Dread, where Bart makes freinds with one of these (the entire damn planet's got a terminal disease of some sort). She dies before Bart could fufill her last wish, or she could complete her doll of him, leaving it without hair. Bart goes bald and skull-waxed from then on.

Comic Books
  • "The Kid Who Collected Spider-Man", a classic Spidey story, features one of these.
  • Yes, one showed up in Empowered. Yes, the title character gets sent over by the local "Make-A-Wish" people. Yes, he always wanted to be a supervillain. Yes, he actually becomes one.
  • The entire plot of a Jack Chick tract called The Little Princess. The girl is dying but gets saved by a Christian family before she kicks the bucket.
  • 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.

Commercials
  • Of course, every single ad from a foundation for kids with cancer. Every. Single. Ad. Though, to be fair, it's hard to see how they could make an ad for such a foundation and not have a Littlest Cancer Patient.

Fanfic
  • Part of a plot device in DC Nation. A fund-raiser for a San Francisco children's hospital had some rare Titans action figures and memorabilia up for sale, with her heroes themselves guarding the memorabilia and interacting with fans. One of the action figures goes missing turns out it was the older brother of Littlest Cancer Patient, trying to get the ultimate Christmas gift for what was likely to be her last Christmas.

Film
  • Sandman's daughter in Spider-Man 3.
  • The Kids In The Hall movie 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.
  • Pictured above: Played completely straight in The Day After Tomorrow, with a degree of earnestness that had this editor desperately wishing for a polar bear attack.
  • The weeping, screaming, hideously-deformed Baby from Eraserhead fits this description, except that it is not The Woobie.
    • Rather infamously, David Lynch refuses to explain what The Baby really is made of.
      • Hmmm... Ever read "Pickman's Model"?
  • Subverted in Quarantine, where the sick little girl who fits most of the markers of this trope has The Virus. "It's just bronchitis!" screams her mom, right before being messily devoured.
    • And thus, subverted as well in [REC], the Spanish horror movie Quarantine is based on. "ˇSon anginas!" says the mother... And then the girl bites her face and runs away.
  • Bethan in Very Annie Mary is an older than usual example (she's sixteen). Part of the film's plot revolves around the efforts of the people of her small Welsh hometown to raise the money to send her to Disneyland, when she'd rather have a new sound system.
  • Subverted in The Orphanage. The protagonist's son dies in an accident instead.
  • Parodied in Cecil B. Demented, where the adorable cancer patient at a benefit is shown to be an annoying little jerk who probably deserves to die. He does, a few minutes later, when the charity worker he was tormenting shuts off his respirator while everyone else is distracted by Cecil's kidnapping of a Hollywood star present at the benefit. Then again, did you expect anything less from John Waters?
  • Parodied in BASEketball. The kid lives, sure, but... just watch the movie for yourself. Sadly, no one on youtube seems to have put up the hospital scene (at least not in watchable quality).
  • Parodied once again by the character of Lisa Davis in Airplane!; her IV keeps getting ripped out and she has to reattach it herself before she flatlines.
  • In Thank You For Smoking, the anti-smoking Moral Guardians attempt to use "Cancer Boy" as a trump card in a television appearance against tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor. It backfires, after which point one Moral Guardian even complains to his aide that the Littlest Cancer Patient they picked wasn't little enough.
  • Half of the plot of The Gift revolved around an arguably not littlest cancer patient. However the writers do use her to the fullest heart string yank effect possible.

Literature

Live Action TV
  • Seinfeld plays this one for laughs. In "The Wink", Kramer accidentally sells George Steinbrenner's birthday card to a sports memorabilia shop, who then gives it to a terminally ill kid. Paul O'Neill then has to hit two home runs in order to get it back.
    Kramer: Two? Sure kid, yeah. But then you gotta promise you'll do something for me.
    Bobby: I know. Get out of this bed one day and walk again.
    Kramer: Yeah, that would be nice. But I really just need the card.
    • Also hilariously subverted with Donald the Bubble Boy. Lacking an immune system and forced to live in a plastic bubble, he's a bitter and rude boy who's still completely beloved by his community.
  • Parodied on Arrested Development, where Maeby assumes the identity of a teenage girl with a terminal disease called "B.S." in order to make some quick cash. Nobody realizes that "Surely Fünke" (Surely, as in the opposite of Maybe...) isn't a real person.
  • A Littlest Cancer Patient died in "Angels and Blimps", an episode of Ally McBeal, but he was played by Haley Joel Osmont, so it wasn't really that sad.
    • Wasn't that the episode where the dying boy hires Ally because he wants to sue God?
      • Yes it was, and the fact that he was played by a pre-fame Haley Joel Osment should not mean it wasn't effective. Though the tearjerkiest part of it all was when Ling Woo engineered it to where a blimp flies past his hospital room's window while Ally is visiting (to fulfill something Ally said was a happy childhood memory of hers) and the next scene is of Ling, normally a hard-as-nails type, exiting the hospital (where she'd been visiting the LCP) while wiping tears away.
  • Viciously subverted in Babylon 5's "Believers" as part of J Michael Straczynski's personal war on 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 calmly and ritually kill the boy afterward because according to their beliefs opening his body up allowed his spirit to leave it.
    • "Believers" sounds similar to a story arc in Peter David's Deep Space Nine novel, "The Siege". One of the beings stranded on DS 9 is a pre-teen alien boy with a terminal disease, but the parents won't let Dr. Bashir (easily) cure him because it's against their religious beliefs. Bashir traumatizes the mother into giving consent, whereupon the father (who's a supreme religious leader) condemns them for heresy and banishes them from ever returning home.
    • 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 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 never seen again in the series.
      • They even later blow up the Jump Gate to that race's star system, since nobody (except pirates and raiders) is using it anyway...
  • Heavily subverted by Peter David again in Star Trek The Next Generation novel, Strike Zone: the "cancer" patient is an older teenage alien with pheromones or something and influences Wesley Crusher, pretty young at this point, to spend most of the book exhausting himself researching the fatal disease ("The Rot"). Then do you do spoiler space - on a promise of a cure, the CP betrays Starship Enterprise to other aliens, who promptly shoot him dead. Oh, and Wesley didn't ever find a cure. I think.
  • Mildly subverted in House: the title character 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 the Littlest Cancer Patient talked him into kissing her.
    • And, of course, there's Wilson's patients. "Bald-headed cancer kids" is probably the kindest thing House has said about them...
    • Mocked in the episode "Here Kitty" where there is a cat that appears to have the ability to predict a person's imminent death by seeking out that person's company. House tests this by bringing the "therapy cat" into the hospital's child pediatric ward and sets the cat amongst the children.
      • Given House's general ass-like behavior, it's not surprising that he talks about the LC Ps in this way (and pulled the cat stunt, he had no actual belief in the cat's death-predicting abilities) to shock people. However, it's notable that on the episode where he actually had to treat the LCP, he was substantially nicer to her (at least to her face) than most of his patients, and when she told him that she didn't want to die yet because Who would take care of her mom? he looked the closest he's ever come on the show to crying. That episode was definitely a case of using the LCP for a 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 crippled.
  • ER had a Story Arc dedicated to one of these, the head doctor's son.
  • Molly in Heroes has a life threatening anti-supers virus at the end of Season 1. She is cured by Mohinder.
  • Subverted in the Pushing Daisies episode "Corpsicle": The littlest cancer patient (well, littlest heart condition patient) is a complete Jerk Ass who takes out his bitterness about his condition on everyone else. When the Wish-A-Wish Foundation lady comes by, his wish is "for those insurance company jerks who rejected my transplant application to keel over and die."
    • The Wish-a-Wish lady grants his wish.
  • In the Torchwood episode "Dead Man Walking," Owen has a Pet The Dog 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.
    • Well, given that said kid is the last of thirteen souls that Death needs to cement his kingdom on Earth, it's safe to say that Owen was probably thinking of a far bigger picture at that point. Plus, he did note that there was still a small chance of the child surviving and the next chemo treatment being successful.
  • Brilliantly and cruelly subverted in the Law and Order Special Victims Unit episode "Sick", their Ripped From The Headlines take on the second round of child molestation allegations against Michael Jackson. After the detectives begin investigating the Jacko-surrogate (who has bribed a family of a victim, a now dangerously disturbed boy, to shut up), one of these comes forward saying she was also molested at a charity gathering. It turns out that first, she was not molested, but forced to say this by her grandmother/guardian so they could get a similar settlement so the girl could live. Second is even worse: she doesn't have cancer; her grandmother is secretly poisoning her to simulate leukemia symptoms and profit off her terminally sick state by way of charity donations. The girl is saved, but with her claim proven false and the actual victim taken out of the country by his greedy family, the case against the Jacko-surrogate collapses. While the cops vow to get him eventually, it hasn't been brought up since. What's really sad is that this is Truth In Television; there have been people who intentionally sickened children in their care to fleece charities.
    • It's called Munchausen by Proxy - making someone in your care intentionally sick to garner respect and sympathy. And money...
    • Money was the chief motive in a related story from Criminal Intent, in which the Littlest Cancer Patient whose blogs, phone interviews and autobiography brought the nation to tears turned out to be a complete hoax: her Genre Savvy "guardian" wrote the book and blog herself, faked the phone calls, and even accepted donations of home medical equipment to stockpile for future sale on eBay. The truth only came out when a would-be benefactor insisted on meeting the non-existent girl in person.
  • Horatio is forced to divulge the existence of his brother's illegitimate daughter (and her mother) to the widow when the daughter requires a bone marrow transplant and neither himself nor the mother is a match.
  • The Young Riders had a particularly heinous example of this in the otherwise decent episode "The Littlest Cowboy" (yes, that's the real title). To make it worse, the child actor used was extremely untalented.
  • The Commish arranged for a young boy dying of cancer, who had wanted to be a police officer, to ride along in a squad car, and he even helps make an arrest (though we see the 'criminal' is actually a police officer in disguise).
  • Oz. An unseen version of this trope serves to humanise lifer Rebadow, who tries raising money to first send his dying grandson to Disneyland, later to get him treatment. He finally gets the money by winning the lottery, only to have his partner (a prison guard) refuse to give Rebadow his half. The guard later feels guilty and changes his mind, but by then it's too late.
  • SCTV had a parody of "The Babe Ruth Story", where the Babe (John Candy) promises to hit a home run for a sick kid. The kid starts making more and more requests, like an inside-the-park home run, and an autographed ball from every player in the league, and when Babe even suggests it may not be possible the kid starts whimpering and hyperventilating. When the kid gets Babe eating fifty hot dogs while spinning around on one foot, the Babe finally snaps.
    • Likewise, Saturday Night Live did a similar sketch starring SCTV alum John Belushi. In the SNL version the little boy goes into cardiac arrest after a fat, drunk and over the hill Babe strikes out.
  • Power Rangers RPM has an entire orphanage full of them in Corinth, the Last City on Earth. One of the Rangers stole five million dollars from the mafia to help pay for their medicine.
  • Used with a twist in Strong Medicine. A little girl needs a marrow transplant and the mother isn't compatible, so Lu Delgado tries to convince the (as always) Jerk Ass father to donate (he had left them because he believed the girl wasn't his daughter and the wife had cheated on him, despite knowing the LCP was sick). After bullying guilt-tripping convincing the dad into trying anyway, Lu finds out that he's really not compatible either. And after snooping around some more, it turns out the kid had been a victim of a Twin Switch after her birth, hence why the "parents" weren't able to donate: she wasn't their daughter to start with.
  • Knight Rider pulls this with Becky, a child who even KITT will surrender his dignity for, and who requires a bone marrow transplant. Of course, the only match is a street kid fighting a turf war on the other side of the country...
  • How have we not mentioned the completely merciless parody in the Chappelle's Show sketch "Make a Wish," where the little kid's dying wish is to meet Dave Chappelle, who arrives and proceeds to beat the pants off the kid at Street Hoops, all while enthusiastically taunting him?
    Dave: Haha, GAME! In your face! In your FACE! Feel better.
    Billy (just before flatlining): Half Baked sucked anyway.
  • Abused frequently on Grey's Anatomy, especially since the addition of Arizona's pediatric surgeon character, most egregiously in the episode "Sweet Surrender": the little girl actually has Tay-Sachs, and has made it to six years old (which is rare), and her desperate father spends most of the day running around searching for miracle cures in Mexico, which results in Bailey basically cuddling the girl all day. Finally, she takes a turn for the worse and Bailey and Arizona gently tell the father to stop and just hold her as she dies, which he does, tearfully promising her that they'll go to Mexico soon and describing its beautiful beaches to her. Oh, and she has giant eyes and an adorable beanie. Troper knew she was being manipulated like crazy and still bawled her eyes out.

Music
  • The Music Video for We Are Scientists' song "It's a Hit" features a particularly gut-wrenching subversion of the "win the game for me" trope: lead singer Keith Murray as a 1920s boxer is approached by his "biggest fan", a young boy with a terminal disease, and promises to win the match for him. Unfortunately, Keith is then paired up with a heavyweight who punches him so hard that he is killed in the ring - and the bloodsplatter hits the Littlest Cancer Patient, who has a ringside seat.
  • The title character of Conor Oberst's song "Danny Callahan" (on his self-titled album) is a Littlest Cancer Patient. Subverted: "Even Western medicine/It couldn't save Danny Callahan/Bad bone marrow, a bald little boy." Ouch.
  • "Carry You Home" by James Blunt, although Word Of God states that it's about a war-buddy of Blunt's.
  • A popular theme in Christian pop and country music; Sherrie Austin's "Streets of Heaven," for instance, with the Glurge-tastic lyrics:
    She's much too young to be on her own:
    Barely just turned seven.
    So who will hold her hand when she crosses the streets of Heaven?

Professional Wrestling
  • In a rare adult version (and not televised in the hospital), professional wrestler Zach Gowan lost one of his legs as a kid (and met Hulk Hogan in the process), but gained a contract in both the WWE and TNA on separate occasions. He does an impressive moonsault, which he used on—of all wrestlers—Big Show to earn his WWE contract storyline-wise.
    • And then Vince McMahon completely wasted him in the WWE, in a bit of Wrestle Crap that still boggles the minds of many fans. Seriously, one-legged moonsaults aren't worth pushing?
      • Apparently, Gowan was a real jerkass with an entitlement complex behind the scenes. The nickname the wrestlers had for him was "The Little Prince". This may or may not be true, but considering the tone of his blog, it shouldn't be hard to imagine.

Theatre

Video Games
  • Breath Of Fire 3 has an enemy tournament participant claim falsely that his daughter is ill and needs the prize money for an operation. Subverted, in that the heroes try to beat him anyway.
    • Of course, the heroes don't really have a choice...
  • Trauma Center has their GUILT patients, though not all of them are kids.
    • Second Opinion has Tyler's younger sister who is afflicted by a rare disease caused by the GUILT, as parodied by the Awesome Series.
    Tyler: Doctor, my sister has cancer. (Derek stares angrily) ZOMBIE CANCER!
    Derek: Hahaha, yeah! (high five)
    — Awesome Center: Under the Awesome
  • Mega Man Battle Network 3 had Mamoru, the Littlest Heart Disease Patient as part of an arc. In a bit of a subversion, it's implied that he is actually in control of the Bonus Boss, Serenade.EXE - the only other character that can match Bass.EXE, Protoman.EXE, and MegaMan.exe.
    • And owns the very shady Undernet, to boot.
  • Hikaru in Lifesigns Surgical Unit - at least in the first game. By the second she's perfectly fine thanks to a bone marrow transplant from the main character in the first.
  • Polka in Eternal Sonata. She's a fourteen year-old girl dying of a terminal illness. Only she's not. She's actually fated to sacrifice herself to save the world.
  • Parodied in Sam And Max: Beyond Time and Space, where Timmy Two-Teeth is dying of terminal Tourette's.

Web Original
  • Presented unsympathetically in this bit from The Onion about a child who bankrupts the Make-A-Wish foundation with a wish for unlimited wishes.

Webcomics

Western Animation
  • Also subverted by Sealab 2021 in the episode "Little Orphan Angry", where a young con artist kept on pretending to be ill, faking his death, and changing his identity and disease to constantly get free stuff from the Make a Wish Foundation. He eventually gets his comeuppance by being eaten by a shark.
  • The "win the game" variation was very cruelly subverted and deconstructed in the South Park episode "Stanley's Cup", where the kid with leukemia was depending on his little league hockey team winning. At first the team (not knowing how to play or skate and against opponents who couldn't either) tie and the doctor says his state is "a tie". When the team is unable to play another team they sub for a professional team and are very savagely beaten and he actually gives up hope and dies.
  • The Simpsons parodies this with Patches and Poor Violet, two pale, perpetually-dying orphans. They have been swindled of their "vitamin money" by Bart, chased away from Old Jewish Man's storefront with him exhorting them to "Come back when you get some parents!", and been violently knocked away from a leaky gas line by Homer and Ned. Quoth Poor Violet after the last one: "I taste bwood."
    • Don't forget when Mayor Quimby kicked them out of the hospital to make room for a plastic surgery wing!
      • The pair's first appearance illustrates their place in the world when Lisa introduces them to (an already guilt-wracked) Bart:
    Lisa: Bart, this is Patches and this is Poor Violet.
    Bart: Ughh..I don't like where this is going.
    • Another subversion is featured in "Homer Loves Flanders" where Mr. Burns is telling the football team that there's a little crippled boy in the hospital who wants them to win; he goes on to say that he knows this because he crippled the kid himself to inspire them. Cue a cutaway to the hospital with a bedridden and cast wearing Milhouse:
    Milhouse: I hope they win... or Mr. Burns said he's coming back.
  • Family Guy parodies this and the Make-A-Wish foundation when they had a kid ask the smiling spokeswoman "Can you cure my cancer?" to which she cheerfully replied "No!"
    • In another episode, the "Grant A Dream" Foundation has a dying leukemia patient whose wish was to play quarterback for the Denver Broncos. Cue the opposing football players all piling on top of him, even as the announcer quips that "little Johnny should have wished for some blocking."
      • Worth mentioning, this episode's A-plot is about Peter scamming the system in order to revive a cancelled TV show he likes; when the Foundation comes back expecting a dead kid for publicity, Peter claims he healed Chris and the B-plot comes into play.
    • So did South Park when they finally decided to kill Kenny forever. "He said his wish is not to die."
      • Instead, he got Madonna... whom he railed against (translated by Stan) as being "irrelevant" - all with her outside the door, and apparently not having heard.
  • Such a character appears in an episode of Metalocalypse. In keeping with the Contractual Immortality, she dies naturally rather than by any of the contrived accidents that usually fell those associated with Dethklok, but unusually for this trope, the death happens on screen.
    • The whole episode "Deth Kids" is essentially a subversion of this trope. The LCP appears in a television ad stating that she wants most to meet Toki Wartooth; Toki, in protest of his child-friendly image, refuses and goes on a psychotic (demonic?) rampage around Mordhaus. When Charles Foster Ofdenson presents him a DVD of the LCP singing a song about how brutal and metal life is, he changes his mind and rushes to meet her at the last second, only to find that it was a last second too much. The episode ends with a sprinkling of High Octane Nightmare Fuel as he sees her body decay and become maggot-infested and hears her voice saying that he killed her.
  • Superjail! had an episode about girl with cancer whom Jailbot accidentally brought into the jail. One of the inmates reads the tag that says she has it and thinks "Cancer" (pronouncing it "Sanser") is her name. The Contractual Immortality is played partially straight. She dies (sort of) on-screen, but it was apparently from a combination of the cancer and getting crushed under bunch of boxes (still much less violent than the norm). Also worth noting is that we see her coughing up a bunch of blood and are shown most of her organs screaming in pain while her kidneys fail.
  • An episode of Spiderman The Animated Series was based on the comic book story mentioned above.
  • Dot played this type of character in the Animaniacs movie "Wakko's Wish". And she was such a cute little terminally ill kid! Unsurprisingly subverted, given the source material. It turns out she was just acting the entire time, and the "surgery" she was trying to get the entire film was having a beauty mark added.

Miscellaneous
  • This "Pea Soup for the Cynic's Soul" story about a girl whose town rallies behind her to help her fly out in the middle of a flood to get a kidney transplant initially reads like one of those Chicken Soup for the Soul stories, but then, like the other Pea Soup stories, has a twist that results in a Downer Ending(in which not only does the girl die when the building they're in collapses, but so do many of those who helped with her rescue).

Truth In Television
  • The "win the game" promise from an athlete version is probably inspired by the Real Life story of Babe Ruth who promised a child sick in the hospital that he would hit a homerun next game just for him. When Babe Ruth went on to hit a homerun for the kid a newspaper made the story famous. Most tellings of the story (including the original) leave out the fact that Babe Ruth failed to hit a homerun in the next game, and had to go back to the kid and tell him that someone was using a mirror to shine a light in his eyes when he was batting, but not to worry, cause he would be sure to hit a homerun next game - which then he did.
  • The very, very heart-wrenching winner of a Pulitzer Prize in feature photography was a series of captioned photos that followed the last days of a real-life Littlest Cancer Patient and his ultimate death. It's made even worse by the pictures of his mother and the absolutely crushing sorrow on her face. The link is available here and is not for the faint of heart.
  • A Teenaged Cancer Patient (and aspiring director) is featured in the extras of the Extended Edition DVDs for Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King as the inspiration for the song "Into The West". After he dies, "Into The West" is played for the first time at his funeral.
  • Another Teenaged Cancer Patient example: the story behind the creation of pediatric cancer charity the Angel 34 Foundation. It was founded by Nicole, a fifteen-year-old girl dying of Ewing's sarcoma, who realized that Slurpees helped numb the mouth sores left by her chemo treatments and started a crusade to have Slurpee machines installed in hospitals where chemo is administrated.
  • Ezra Chatterton got a Make-A-Wish visit to World Of Warcraft, voiced a new character in the game, designed an epic crossbow, got the first Phoenix mount, and died of a brain tumor. A "Running of the Bulls" memorial a couple of weeks later eventually crashed the server.
  • Very much Truth In Television, except that Real Life frequently tends to subvert the trope and the Littlest Cancer Patient ends up dying, as St Jude's Research Hospital will remind you at any opportunity. They've managed to find ways to increase survival rates dramatically, but they need your donations to keep the work going. You wouldn't want the Littlest Cancer Patient to die because you couldn't afford $20 a month, would you?
  • Non-fatal example: Piers Anthony has maintained a long correspondence with Jenny Gildwarg, a fan of his Xanth novels who was struck by a car at age 12 and left comatose. Both he and Jenny's family believe that hearing her mother read letters from her favorite novelist helped Jenny wake up from her coma, and Anthony wrote her into his Xanth novels as "Jenny Elf". She's still a quadriplegic, but now writes her own letters by moving her eyes; their collected early letters have been published, and can out-Tear Jerker even conventional Littlest Cancer Patient stories.
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