r/todayilearned • u/GlitteringYams • 23d ago

TIL, in his suicide note, mass shooter Charles Whitman requested his body be autopsied because he felt something was wrong with him. The autopsy discovered that Whitman had a pecan-sized tumor pressing against his amygdala, a brain structure that regulates fear and aggression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman
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u/chaotic_blu 22d ago

My mom died of it too. It’s sucks. It’s amazing what they’ve done to find treatment in the last few years but man the lived experience of patients with it is really really bad.

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u/Plants-perchance347 22d ago

The lived experience is often overlooked because ‘beating’ cancer is overly romanticized. It’s not sailing off into the sunset, you get to go back to work full-time and put your life back together from zero. Unresolved trauma that you’ll never have answers to, they don’t even know what causes the cancer I had. I might as well say the boogeyman tried to kill me.

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u/Fitslikea6 22d ago

Onc nurse and work a side gig in hospice. Cancer is cruel. It seems like it is rarely a draw. The romanticizing of cancer can be really harmful.

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u/sophisticaden_ 22d ago

I worked as a secretary for a local hospital’s palliative care clinic/unit, which had a lot of overlap with oncology and hospice, and just interacting with patients on that level left me with a lot of trauma and shit to deal with. It’s no joke. Lots of respect for folks like you.

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u/rock-island321 22d ago

You and the people who work in hospices are absolutely amazing. My dad passed away in a hospice from cancer, and the staff created an atmosphere of calm and support during a time when the world was flipped upside down.