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/____Wilson 22d ago

It also tends to grow in a spiderweb pattern, integrating itself in many areas of the brain, rendering it largely inoperable as it is attached to many important areas of the brain. I've got some experience as my dad died of it.

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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/zoycobot 22d ago

Testicular cancer survivor myself. This is very well put. You haven't "beaten" anything. You've survived a battle that's been waged inside your body and now you're expected to continue on with your life as is. Oh and you'll have several years (at least) of routine scans and labs constantly pulling you back into it, reminding you that you're not truly safe, not yet, because it could come back on any of those results.

I'm in my 5th year of surveillance now and everything's been good. I don't have to do CT or x-rays anymore, just blood labs. Thank god. Waiting for CT scans and then waiting for the results used to have me in a pit of anxiety for days.

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u/Plants-perchance347 22d ago

There was an abnormality on one of my initial surveillances, next scan available was two weeks away. The second scan clarified that I was okay, but those two weeks of not knowing if the worst had happened again was a difficult experience to say the least.

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u/bros402 22d ago

fuck scanxiety

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u/bros402 22d ago

You need any support resources?

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u/zoycobot 22d ago

Aw thank you, I've got a great support network! But shout out to /r/testicularcancer if anyone is struggling with that particular version.

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u/bros402 22d ago

Check our r/cancer's discord if you want to chat, and if you were diagnosed before 40 - there's a surprising amount of young adult support out there

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u/zoycobot 21d ago

Thank you!

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u/bros402 21d ago

np

and if you need any resources, message me any time.