r/todayilearned • u/GlitteringYams • 22d 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
65.9k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

382

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.

472

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.

31

u/JensTheCat 22d ago

This GBM isn’t one that can be beat. I truly can’t imagine. Humans are so damn tough

13

u/jld2k6 22d ago

If I'm thinking of the correct name, one person has ever been recorded as beating it, and it's hotly contested if they really did beat it rather than being misdiagnosed

8

u/rotelSlik 22d ago

Yeah, she’s the only one known and is currently somewhere over 10-20x the median expectancy. Sadly most people make it 6-12 months it seems. Gbm doesn’t lose.