No Healthcare in the Apocalypse

"Not all technology, mind you. You don't see them raiding hospitals to cart away Auto-Docs or armfuls of prosthetic organs. No, they prefer the sort of technology that puts people in hospitals. Or graves, rather, since hospitals went the way of the dodo."

— Robert House, Fallout: New Vegas

Modern medicine has made a lot of people's lives easier, with countless disabling or life-threatening conditions becoming more easily treatable. Missing limbs can be replaced with prosthetics, diabetes can be managed with insulin, and various chronic diseases can be treated, or even cured, with medications or surgeries. But what happens if these treatments stop being commonly available?

In the world of apocalyptic fiction, things that were once taken for granted become scarce — including most of the medicines currently used by millions of people. Many of these are difficult, if not outright impossible to produce in a non-industrial setting. (Take, for example, insulin medication: it's complicated to manufacture and expires without refrigeration, yet many diabetic people simply can't live without it.) Even something as simple as needing glasses could pose as a handicap, should they be broken or lost without a replacement. Though not all of these conditions would be a death sentence without modern medicine, most would at least make life a lot harder, something that can't be afforded in the apocalypse.

These are all things the apocalypse's survivors may need to grapple with, as members of their group realize they're cut off from the treatments that have been (in many cases) keeping them alive. Sometimes, the group may resolve that No One Gets Left Behind, and work to find this person the treatment they need. They may become Disaster Scavengers to search for needed medications. In certain situations, they may even be able to throw off the disability. Other times, the disabled survivor might be less fortunate and will end up dying, being abandoned by their peers, or committing suicide out of hopelessness. Handicapped survivors who see no way forward may invoke I Will Only Slow You Down or More Expendable Than You.

A common justification for Bury Your Disabled. Compare with Death by Disfigurement and Too Good for This Sinful Earth, for the less lucky. Contrast with Reduced to Ratburgers.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, Akira's father Teruo is suffering from an Incurable Cough of Death and hides it from Akira to keep him from worrying. Given the Zombie Apocalypse and the remoteness of Gunma, Teruo believes he won't have long left to live, and finding a doctor for treatment is nigh impossible. It's later revealed that Teruo is suffering from hemorrhoids rather than something terminal like tuberculosis or cancer. That's when Akira decides to add finding a doctor who can treat his dad to his bucket list.
• Drifting Classroom: Takamatsu almost dies from appendicitis at one point, forcing the other children to perform emergency surgery on him. He'd probably have died outright if his mother hadn't been able to stash away medical supplies for the children to uncover in the post-apocalyptic future they're stranded in, thanks to Nishi's psychic link.

Comic Book

• Crossed: The final Badlands arc starts by featuring rich doomsday preppers and their architect, who initially avoid the Technically Living Zombies by hiding in a survival bunker. One of their early casualties dies after his appendix bursts and the only doctor available to remove it is a dermatologist.
• The Walking Dead:
  • This is the main reason for why Amputation Stops Spread only works a few times; if someone is bitten by a Walker, the injured limb has to be removed immediately (and this is obviously impossible if they're bitten somewhere that can't be amputated, like the torso or head), and unless done by a medical professional, the amputee will almost certainly die from bloodloss or infection anyway. As you can probably guess, the times the main characters have a doctor around at those exact moments can be counted on one hand. ^note  Specifically, Rick Grimes right hand, which he broke beyond use while beating a child murderer to a pulp, with the closest thing to medical help being a veterenarian setting it so it could heal into a stiff, useless lump. Which was later chopped off by The Governor.
  • In the second Clementine graphic novel, Clementine befriends another teenager who's virtually blind without her glasses. Her older brother broke her original pair to force her to be dependant on him out of some bizarre obsession to make her stay with him, but while they were scavenging for supplies some time later, she happened to stumble into an optometrist store, and found a new pair that were close enough to her prescription to work. She understandably hightailed it out of there, leaving her brother behind.
  • One of the fighters in the gladiator games The Governor holds in Woodbury gets carried away and breaks his opponents front teeth during their battle. Afterwards, the guy furiously points out that he can't exactly go to a dentist to get new ones, and stabs his opponent to death.

Comedy

• The Trope Namer is a Patton Oswalt routine, where he mentions that he's trying to get off of Prozac because he believes that there will be a The Road Warrior-style apocalypse within a generation, and "there'll be no Prozac in the apocalypse." Furthermore, he doesn't want to end up as a manic-depressive Sex Slave to his tribe of marauders.

Films — Live-Action

• In Five, none of the five survivors have any medical training, nor do they have much in the way of medical supplies. As a result, the completely unqualified Michael is forced to deliver Roseanne's baby,and they have no way of treating Barnstable when he develops radiation poisoning and it eventually kills him.
• In the Dolph Lundgren film "The Last Patrol", the survivors of a California Collapse end up in trouble when some of them drink contaminated goat milk, leading to a quest to find antibiotics that eventually leads to a battle with the local warlord. Lundgren's character is the only member of the group to know enough medicine to know they need antibiotics, but that is the full extent of his medical knowledge.
• Mad Max:
  • Implied in Mad Max and its sequel for Max's wife Jessie. She is run over by Toecutters gang and initially survives, albeit in critical condition. She is confirmed to be dead by the second film, most likely due to the hospital's lack of resources from society breaking down. Though strangely enough, Roop (one of Max's colleagues) is given an electronic larynx after his throat gets mutilated by broken glass during the opening car chase with Nightrider. Considering that society is beginning to collapse, that kind of resource investment seems out of place, especially in the isolated backwater the movie takes place in. Perhaps Roop just got lucky getting one of the last units on the shelf.
  • Mad Max: Fury Road: Angharad's unborn baby is cut out of her while she is dying by the Organic Mechanic, who displays a butcher-like demeanor and calmness as he fiddles with the umbilical cord and the baby's corpse, clearly having no interest in the wellbeing of either mother or child. Max himself starts out the film getting captured and enslaved as a "bloodbag"; unwilling victims of rudimentary blood transfusions for Immortan Joe's Warboys, many of whom suffer from various radiation and chemically-induced illnesses. The transfusions are just meant to keep them going long enough to "die heroically" for Immortan Joe's benefit.
• A Quiet Place: In the opening scene, the family is at an abandoned drugstore looking for medicine for middle child Marcus, who is so sick he needs to be carried. The drugstore has been picked clean of everything except the chips (crisps for UK readers) in the snack section (Why did nobody take the chips? Because that would make noise.)
• Stake Land: There is a doctor in the first lockdown town that Mister and Martin pass through, but she's running low on supplies and is deeply relieved to be given a few bottles of pills for her future patients.
• State Of Emergency: One of the warehouse survivors goes into diabetic shock from a lack of insulin, prompting Jim to leave to find some for her.
• The Third Man: After its devastation by the recent war, Vienna is suffering from a shortage of penicillin, with the only reliable sources coming from the military hospitals. Harry Lime led a smuggling ring that stole and diluted these supplies for sale on the black market, causing much death and suffering.
• Threads points out that, even if Britain's National Health Service survived a nuclear attack, it would be unable to cope with the effects of even a single nuke on a single city. This is illustrated via a scene set in a hospital which has been overrun with bomb casualties, where operations (including amputations) are being carried out without anaesthetics, under conditions where even basic levels of hygiene are impossible to maintain. The accompanying narration states that doctors can now do virtually nothing for their patients and are "little better equipped than the nearest survivor."
• World War Z: Gerry Lane's daughter has asthma, and they have to scramble to raid an abandoned pharmacy along with a couple dozen other people at the start of the Zombie Apocalypse. While hunting for a refill for her inhaler, Gerry faces down a man with a gun who breaks in through the back door... who then points them in the right direction after figuring out the Lanes aren't after the same drugs he is.

Literature

• 1632: Several of the short stories feature people who suffer from not having medicine after their entire town is sent back in time.
  • A girl who dies of tetanus.
  • A massive effort to produce insulin ultimately succeeds, but not in time to save most of the diabetics who came back in time.
  • A down-time friend of the involuntary time travelers is badly injured after walking into the middle of a bar fight and needs penicillin to treat his infection. The only penicillin that anyone can find was only meant for veterinary use and has passed the “best used by” date. The doctor uses it to save his patient, but muses that he would have gone to jail for using medicine of that quality in his own time.
• Alas, Babylon: In the aftermath of a nuclear war (the book was written in 1959 and set 20 Minutes into the Future, in a small town in northern Florida), all the insulin-dependent diabetics in the community (including an important secondary character, the mother of the main female character) die within a couple of weeks of "The Day", after the power goes out and refrigeration fails. Later, highwaymen break the glasses of the community's only doctor, who is Blind Without 'Em. (He had a spare pair—which were in his medical bag, which was stolen by the robbers.)
• Discussed in Children of the Dust. Several days after the nuclear attack, Catherine says the lack of dentists in the post-apocalyptic world means she doesn't have to clean her teeth. Her older sister, Sarah, replies that this makes maintaining good oral hygiene all the more important as bad teeth will "have to be pulled out with the pliers."
• Dies the Fire: Most medicine becomes useless within days of the worldwide blackout, after the refrigerators stop working and the cars that would have carried it elsewhere died as well. Juniper's group is able to survive initially because they come across the house of an elderly couple who had extensive food storage, but passed away quickly when they ran out of insulin. Juniper and her Wiccan coven are experienced at using herbs and other natural medicine to help people, but can only do so much. One doctor who settled near Juniper has a box with 12,000 doses of a powdered medicine that can stop diseases like the plague. He mentions that it was the only thing he could carry away with him on foot after leaving his hospital, and notes that they need to save it for emergencies, otherwise it will all be gone in no time.
• H₂O: A plot point in the first book is that Darius needs his glasses and is Blind Without 'Em. In the climax of the second book, this ends up causing him to unintentionally walk into the Big Bad's grasp and allow the latter to do a Hostage for MacGuffin.
• Lucifer's Hammer: Dr. Dan Forrester has Type 1 diabetes, so he needs a regular supply of refrigerated insulin to survive. After the title comet strike ends civilization (and electrical power for refrigeration), he can't make or acquire more insulin. He actually has the medical know-how to be able to do it, but the defense of Jellison's ranch from the New Brotherhood means he has no time to, and he eventually dies.
• The Postman: Medicine became difficult and unavailable in the post collapse world. Technology was destroyed or lost and supply stocks ransacked for drugs or what the people raiding them though can be used as drugs anyway. Diseases caused by poor hygiene killed most of the protagonist's band of survivors years before the main story's start. He is terrified of dying due to an oral infection because of that and treasures his toothbrush and box of dental powder.
• The Stand: One whole chapter deals with the deaths of superflu survivors who'd been immune. Some of those met with accidents that they might have survived, if only there had been other people around to give them medical aid. This includes a man who's bitten by a rattlesnake, and dies trying to administer the antidote, a man who steps on a rusty nail while swimming, and dies trying to saw off his foot when it gets infected, and a woman who falls off her bike and cracks her skull open. And, of course, there's the case of poor Mark, a member of Stuart and Frannie's group, who suffers from appendicitis and dies while they're performing surgery on him.
• Station Eleven:
  • Kirsten's brother Peter, despite being portrayed as The Ace that was able to protect her from numerous other dangers in the aftermath of the Georgia Flu, died of an infection after stepping on a nail. Kirsten calls it "the kind of stupid death that never would have happened in the old world".
  • A mentally ill girl in the airport with Clarke runs out of her medication about a week after landing. She suffers from brutal withdrawals and ends up committing suicide by going outside in the wilderness.
  • Discussed by the survivors in the airport when they're considering all the ways they could die.
• The Walking Dead Fall Of The Governor: Hap Abernathy, one of the Governor’s militiamen, is stuck with glasses that don’t match his prescription. The Zombie Apocalypse keeps him from getting a new pair.
• The Broken Earth Trilogy: Both invoked and defied. Invoked with Tonkee's HRT running out and Wudeh being chronically ill and weak due to the lack of an appropriate diet post-Rifting. Defied with Lerna, who is admitted to the community of Castrima because he is a doctor trained in both surgery and in manufacturing antibiotics.
• The War Against the Chtorr: People in need of consistent medical attention were among the first to die after the civilization collapsed following the chtorran invasion.

Live-Action TV

• 1899: Lucien has to take medication for his seizures. As the vials become scarcer and scarcer, his last fit is unable to be treated, leading to his death.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003): In "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 2", Anders contracts pneumonia in the settlement on New Caprica. Starbuck goes to ask Dr. Cottle, Galactica's chief medical officer, to come treat him, but unfortunately Cottle ran out of antibiotics months ago and the new colony's industry is a long way away from being able to manufacture them. By the time of "Occupation", Starbuck has surrendered to the Cylons to become Leoben's plaything in exchange for the Cylons treating Anders's illness.
• In Colony, Maddie Kenner has a young son with diabetes, and the Transitional Authority that now occupies the planet has elected to halt all insulin production, as they consider diabetics to be a drain on society. Consequently, Maddie is forced to keep searching for black-market sources for insulin.
• Brought up in an episode of Criminal Minds, where the UnSub is a doomsday prepper. Whilst doing research, the team come across an article suggesting that people get LASIK. Rossi lampshades the difficulty in finding a LensCrafters in the post-apocalypse, whilst a spooked Penelope draws comparisons to the Twilight Zone example below.
• Dark (2017): Regina is diagnosed with cancer a year before the apocalypse is due to happen. Caring for her is difficult since Claudia has to forage for medicine. Claudia eventually orders Regina's Mercy Kill via Vorpal Pillow.
• Defiance: Crime boss Datak Tarr mentions that he's one of the few people who can supply anti-psychotics in post-Alien Invasion Missouri. And even then his supplies are intermittent enough that Pilar McCawley tried to poison her kids in one of her worse episodes and had to be sent away by her husband.
• Into the Badlands: Played with. Veil and her father are both doctors and provide care to patients from barons to the enslaved cogs; but they appear to be the only physicians in the entirety of the Badlands - so that the Widow has Veil kidnapped to perform emergency surgery. They are also quite limited in what they can do: Veil can trepan a skull to treat a hematoma, but Quinn's brain tumor is incurable. Some of the factions outside the Badlands do have healing skills, such as the Abbotts' Master's gift for magically repairing bones.
• Jeremiah: Every known surgeon in the world died when the Big Death decimated the world's adult population, so the few doctors shown in the show tend to have been kids during the pandemic who don't have either the training or supplies that doctors fifteen years earlier would have had, and the scarcity of such doctors can have consequences (guest character Maggie is in wheelchair because there were no doctors to set her broken legs, Villain of the Week Michael has no therapists to talk down his Godhood Seeker complex, etc.).
  • "The Bag" features a traveling doctor who only has enough medical supplies (such as a limited amount of rubber gloves and 15-year-old prescription bottles) to fit in the eponymous bag and claims to have learned basic medicine while watching his doctor father work. He later admits that he lied about actually paying much attention to those lessons but he is still skilled enough to save at least one Imperiled in Pregnancy patient and her baby.
  • In "Things Left Unsaid Part 2", one of the former nerds Theo has learning all of the old basic scientific principles has enough general medical knowledge to operate on a wounded Elizabeth after she is shot by Valhalla Sector soldiers, while using the girlfriend/prostitute he was with when Kurdy and Elizabeth showed up as his assistant. He fails to save Elizabeth, who has an hours-old serious wound that a fully equipped team of modern doctors would be necessary to treat.
• The Last Man on Earth: Lack of physical and mental healthcare becomes a HUGE problem for the survivors after a plague wipes out the vast majority of humanity.
  • Phil (not the Tandy one) develops appendicitis, forcing Gail and Todd to try performing emergency surgery even though they have no medical experience. It doesn't have a happy ending.
  • Melissa begins acting strange, paranoid, and violent, and the survivors realize she was on an antipsychotic medication that's run out. They end up having to keep her restrained while desperately searching for the right meds.
  • Erica gets pregnant and has to give birth in an office building (assisted by Gail, who has PTSD from her previous attempt at doctoring). They have no anesthetic, which means Erica feels everything when Gail has to turn the baby around in the womb.
• The Last of Us (2023):
  • Near the end of Bill and Frank's story, Frank has become severely ill with an unidentified disease that has left him too weak to get out of a wheelchair. While Bill provides him with painkillers smuggled out of the Boston Quarantine Zone to make him more comfortable, Frank points out that his illness would have been practically impossible to treat even before the world ended, and that now they're just holding off the inevitable. Therefore, he convinces Bill to give him an overdose of the painkillers so he can pass peacefully. Bill reluctantly agrees (and takes an overdose as well).
  • The difficulty of finding medicine proves a problem for Henry, who needs it for his brother Sam's leukemia. He ends up making a deal with the oppressive FEDRA government to get the medicine in exchange for betraying Rebel Leader Michael to them, leading to Michael's death.
  • After Joel is stabbed by a raider, Ellie has to patch up the wound with a needle and thread she finds in an abandoned house, and later has to make a desperate trade with the raider's group for penicillin to treat the resulting infection.
• Revolution:
  • A minor character in season one is a Crazy Survivalist who successfully survived the Blackout with his daughter thanks to his well-stocked stash... until she got tetanus. It was one of the few diseases he didn't stock up on medication for, so he was forced to watch her slowly die without being able to truly help her.
  • When Nora gets stabbed and the wound becomes infected, Miles is forced to take her to Drexel, a notorious heroin grower and sex trafficker. Why? Because he's the only person Miles knows of who has cultures of penicillium mold, the key ingredient of penicillin.
  • In season two, the schoolteacher-turned-warlord Titus Andover has a wife with diabetes. Since medical-grade insulin is hard to come by, he opts for an alternative treatment: taking prisoners of war and draining their blood for transfusions. Needless to say, Titus's wife is rather distraught at knowing he's killing innocent people for her sake, and eventually commits suicide over it.
• See: Played with. In this post-apocalyptic setting where almost everyone is blind; Paris and a few other characters are trained in basic medical care like stitching lacerations and uncomplicated baby deliveries. They do as well as one could with limited equipment and while working by touch. But Tormada's "experiments" at surgically restoring sight are explicitly nothing but ineffective torture. Even Jerlamarel and his older sighted children are unable to perform eye surgery while having old medical texts to refer to.
  • Edo Voss' army operates out of the ruins of a Pittsburgh hospital. There is no indication that they even know what the building was originally used for.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): A famous example would be the tragedy of Henry Bemis in the episode "Time Enough at Last." Bank teller Bemis loves to read, but no one will ever give him the time or freedom to do so. Then the atomic bomb hits while he's down in the vault reading on his lunch break. Finding himself the only survivor, he makes his way to the public library, which is miraculously undamaged, and is delighted to have both plenty of time and reading material — until he shatters his coke-bottle glasses shortly after piling up all the books he plans to read.
• Under the Dome: With Chester's Mill cut off from outside supply by the dome, drugs start to run out in town. Carolyn has to start hunting through the town for insulin for her mother Alice, competing with 23 other diabetics. And then Reverend Lester goes crazy and burns much of the remaining supply of drugs. Alice ultimately falls into a diabetic coma and dies.
• The Walking Dead (2010):
  • The Governor helps Lily and Tara's lung-cancer-affected dad by venturing to the nursing home for a new oxygen tank, which is a potentially deadly risk rather than a chore.
  • Tina, a former member of the Saviors, is diabetic. She and her companions left the Saviors, and robbed them of their medication stores, after being unable to acquire more insulin from them.
  • In Season 10, Ezekiel develops thyroid cancer, which is nearly impossible to treat without 21st-century techniques like chemotherapy or radiation, which the Alexandria Safe Zone doesn't have; as such, he's resigned to his inevitable death. Fortunately, in Season 11, they make contact with the Commonwealth, which has managed to maintain aspects of modern society like advanced medicine, leading to Ezekiel being treated and eventually cured.
• Y: The Last Man (2021): After the Gendercide, Sam, a transgender man, has issues with finding testosterone.

Video Games

• Ashes 2063: There's no shortage of painkillers and medical kits are fairly common, but finding any medicine more specialized than that is a problem.
  • One of the optional sidequests in Afterglow is to find various kinds of medicine for the doctor in Michonne Circle station. As Scav sums it up, "any drugs with long names".
  • Also in Afterglow, the doctor in Prosperity is able to create medicine such as antifungals for Gasbag spore contaminations, but only because the Water Baron, leader of the town and controller of the water trade, gives her a proper lab and generous resources to work with.
  • Stims, very potent drugs, are exceptionally rare and tend to cause nasty side-effects if mis-applied to humans. Only Scavs can use them freely, thanks to their mutated metabolism.
• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead: Certain starting traits can cause these situations for your character, such as the asthmatic trait (needing an inhaler to avoid crippling physical limitations), the near-sighted and far-sighted traits (needing glasses), and the schizophrenic trait (suffering from delusions unless you regularly take medication).
• Dead Island: During the side quest "Too Much Sugar", Luke, an injured survivor, tasks the player with bringing much-needed insulin to his diabetic brother.
• Dead Rising 2: Chuck is constantly on the run in Fortune City to find Zombrex for his daughter Katie to make sure she doesn't turn into a zombie. The Zombrex can be somewhat hard to find (especially without looking up the locations online) but can also be pawned by the looters in the pawn shops (for a hefty price, with the price escalating every time).
• Dying Light: One of the orphaned children at Rupert's daycare is diabetic, and the ongoing Zombie Apocalypse makes insulin hard to find. Crane is sent to find some from Harran's nearby pharmacies.
• Fallout:
  • This trope is actually zigzagged throughout the series. High-tech installations or factions, such as vaults or the Brotherhood of Steel, have advanced pre-war medical technology, with the BoS even being able to perform cybernetic enhancements. In the first game the small town of Shady Sands has a doctor who has surprisingly good knowledge of medicine, and takes offence to you being surprised by his competence. The Children of the Cathedral are trying to hide their true intents by opening free charity clinics in towns where they spread their influence.
  • Fallout 2: This is a minor plot point in Vault City. The non-citizens living outside the city wall only have access to an old "hand-me-down" Auto Doc from the city itself. One companion recruited there (Cassidy) is reluctant to join you because he has a heart condition that only Vault City can treat (he seems fine though when you convince him to join, but dies if you use chems on him).
  • Fallout 3: While escaping from the Enclave's raid on the purifier, Garza (one of Dr. Li's assistants) is revealed to have a serious heart condition. If he is not given medication, the group is forced to leave him to die (unless the player does it personally).
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • Lampshaded by Mr. House's biggest criticisms of the Brotherhood of Steel: they have no interest in collecting technology that actually helps people instead of hurting them.
    • Caesar's Legion has two examples. Being a slave army made out of eighty-six destroyed tribes, they have nothing more advanced than herbal remedies and a very strict prohibition on chems and alcohol, which fits snugly into their fascist, social Darwinist philosophy. Caesar himselfs suffers from a brain tumor that gives him blackouts and headaches and, because his Legion has no real knowledge of pre-war medicine and an aversion to painkillers, he has been waiting for someone to repair a partially-salvaged Auto Doc he keeps in his tent.
    • The Followers of the Apocalypse are trying hard to avert this trope by training doctors and opening clinics. By the start of the game they're largely swamped in refugees and low on resources, though doing quests for them drastically improves their situation. One of their clinics has a functioning Auto Doc capable of installing cybernetic implants.
• Mad Max (2015):
  • The only doctors available in what was once Australia are so-called "Organic Mechanics". And the only one you find is Abdominus, a Fat Bastard who's more interested in eating roaches and huffing nitrous than learning about medical ethics or even paying attention to what he's doing.
  • Because of the lack of painkillers in the wasteland, the only way Jeet can cope with his chronic migraines is to thread arrowheads through his skin. In fact, the first thing he asks Chumbucket is if his driver, Max, has any knowledge of medicine.
• Metro 2033: The game downplays this trope. Individual stations have hospitals that seem relatively functional. In the sequel an emergency quarantine zone is set up by Hanza following the deployment of a deadly weaponized virus on an independant station by the Reds. The quarantine post looks makeshift but functional, with competent doctors who know what they're doing, and the plague is prevented from spreading further into the metro, showing it did its job, though since the weaponized virus was designed to be short-lived it probably wouldn't have caused much more casualties.
  • One refugee complains that the Hanza merchants charge too high of a price on insulin for his sick son, showing even 20 years after the apocalypse forced Muscovites into the metro, insulin is still produced.
• The New Order Last Days Of Europe: The World War III nuclear war fail state features several stories, among them one elderly couple of diabetics who are slowly dying of insulin deprivation.
• State of Decay: One of the missions has you scavenge a local veterinary clinic for Lily, where you find medicine to treat her lupus.
• Survivalist: A lot of insulin needs to be found or bartered to keep Alice alive, as she's diabetic and uses up the medicine fairly quickly. Her survival is enough of a challenge that there's an ending dedicated to it.
• The Walking Dead (Telltale): The settlement of Crawford, a fortified compound centered around a school campus inside Savannah, instituted strict social darwinist policies where the main rule was that anyone who was a "drain on resources" either had to die or leave. This meant anyone with chronic health conditions (another group of survivors Lee meets are cancer survivors who fled Crawford, knowing they'd be targeted), including diabetes and pregnancy! This eventually backfired when a pregnant woman lashed out and stabbed Crawford's doctor, Logan, to death when he insisted she had to terminate her pregnancy in accordance with the rules, causing a zombie outbreak from within that wiped out the whole settlement.
• Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven:
  • Your character may start with poor vision and will require glasses to see well. If your current pair breaks and you don't have another, you'll have a harder time in combat.
  • Parker, one of your neighbors, is revealed to be a diabetic who requires insulin. There are a few opportunities to scavenge it during the game's chapters, but no long-term solution.

Webcomics

• A prequel comic for Portal 2 reveals the origins of the mysterious Rattman: he was a schizophrenic Aperture employee who survived the events of the Aperture Bring-Your-Daughter-to-Work-Day, but was heavily dependent upon his anti-psychotic medication to function. Unable to leave the facility afterwards, he was forced to ration out his supply of medication, eventually using up the last of it to keep himself functional enough to restore power to Chell's suspension chamber so that she could survive to one day stop GLaDOS.
• Sweet Home (2017): Yuri Park, a resident of the apartment building, is asthmatic. By the time she joins the other survivors of the "monsterization" phenomenon, her inhaler is nearly empty, putting her at risk of asthma attacks.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: In Whole Episode Flashback Simon And Marcy, Simon Petrikov the pre-Sanity Slippage Ice King is shown trying to raise Marcy After the End. One plot point was Simon struggling to find Marcy chicken soup after she catches a cold.
• Rick and Morty: In "Solaricks", Morty gets transported back to his original dimension, an Earth that he and Rick unintentionally turned everyone into Cronenbergian monsters except members of his immediate biological family. When Morty senses a figure approaching behind him, he throws a spear and hits Jerry in the left arm, much to the latter's annoyance that he has to tend to the wound.
  Jerry: Dammit, Morty, there's no doctors anymore.

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