Trauma Center (series)/Tear Jerker

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Trauma Center, being a medical drama, certainly has its moments. Just... dammit, Emilio, you were just getting better...
    • Trauma Team has two as well: Phase 3 of the Patient Zero diagnosis (all of it) and when Joshua didn't even recognize his own father, just calling him "Doctor" like every other doctor he's been to.
      • Gabriel's subsequent meltdown in his office really drove the point home.
  • Though it's on the Narm page as well, the game over screen for Trauma Center: Second Opinion caused this troper to cry a little bit every time she got it (which is saying something, because, uh, said troper is sort of awful at that game).
  • Claire's near-death in Trauma Team, after the freak mall shooting. Thankfully, she got better.
  • Near the end of Trauma Team, where Samuel Trumbull is practically at death's door. This troper's eyes welled up when he went on about how Gabe should continue the diagnosis for the sake of all the people who will ultimately fall ill to the same disease affecting him. Made even sadder with the last questioning session not being so much about diagnosis as it is trying to tell him he'll be able to see his family again. And he's one of the nicer people you diagnose, too.
  • While the theme of the Forensics mode in Trauma Team is sad in general, some of the missions are especially painful.
    • The Second Mission: A young girl falls ill with a disease that slowly destroys her from the inside and out, to the point where she has no friends remaining and her parents are terrified of her violent outburst to the point that they lock her up in her own room. She dies in horrible pain, clawing her hands at the locked door until they are bleeding, and calling desperately for mom and dad to comfort her pain, a call that's never answered.
    • The Third Mission: An elderly woman is infected with a tumor that causes hallucinations. She ends up sincerely believing that the world has been condemned by God. She kills her daughter to save her immortal soul, then tries to kill her husband in the same manner, but fails and dies in the following struggle. Her daughter's last words is the desperate plea for her mother to flee and save herself. The woman's last words suggest the sincere belief and regret that she couldn't "save" her husband. And the old man himself sits alone, wanting nothing more than for her wife to be remembered as the good woman she was.
    • The Last Mission: A young girl has a special virus within her that is dangerously lethal, and which her loving adoptive father hopes to convert to a cure for many of the diseases of the world. But he gets infected with the virus, and as the disease eats away at his sanity, he ends up killing his adoptive daughter in the hope to end the virus with her. And yet in doing so, he gave the virus a means to spread.
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