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Lethal Diagnosis: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
Being diagnosed with an illness is a surefire method for making it suddenly become much worse. Characters who have suffered one or two mild
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}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[Film]] ==
* In the movie ''[[Brazil (film)|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 [[Squick|something that looks unpleasantly like]] [[wikipedia:Aspic|aspic.]]
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** They at least [[Lampshaded]] this when one of the doctors questions how he could even be walking around with a disease that bad.
** Subverted, however, 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.
* Exception: In the first few minutes of [[Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)|the new ''
* Every episode of ''[[House (TV series)|House]]''. Every time the team comes up with a theory, the patient's condition instantly escalates to point of unerring predictability.
** [[Justified Trope|That's almost entirely to do with]] the fact that the diagnosis is always ''wrong'' until the end of the show when they finally figure it out. Considering House's radical treatments, the diagnosis 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.
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* Claude Cat in the ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' short "The Hypochondri-cat" was such a hypochondriac that even [[Induced Hypochondria|mentioning to him that he looked a little green]] would cause him to instantly turn that color. This reaction was played strictly for humor.
* 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.
* 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).
== [[Real Life]] ==
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