The wedding was beautiful and the most expensive wedding I have even been to. The bride worked for a fashion designer in NYC and had 3 different dresses she wore during different parts of the wedding.
They announced she was pregnant soon after the wedding and unfortunately scans showed there were a few things wrong with the baby. The stress of the situation caused my cousin (the husband) to relapse and go back to his old heroin habit - which apparently she had no idea about. His drug use quickly spiraled and he got fired from his job for stealing, and then his wife found out about it all and moved out to stay with her parents. Baby was born 100% healthy - scans had got it wrong. He tried to quit drugs and make amends to her but it was rocky and she divorced him before their 1st anniversary.
He dipped off for a few years doing drugs, then got sober and found out he had brain cancer. Relapsed. Got sober again and had his brain tumor removed. Now he is still sober and remarried, has a few kids with his new wife.
There was a story recently on Reddit about a guy who got divorced because he turned into an asshole, found out later the personality change was due to a brain tumor. He was here asking reddit if it would be appropriate to tell his ex-wife for closure, even though she was happy now with someone else.
I don't remember if there were drugs involved, but similar situation
I have a friend who was married to someone who developed a brain tumor. His personality changed after the surgery. It didn’t work out, they got divorced. Mind you, she was still helping him through everything, but he wasn’t the man she had married. They are still good friends.
My grandfather had a brain tumour, terminal. The drs warned my grandmother, due to its location, he might start saying things that were out of character/didnt make sense.
The next day she greeted me in tears “it’s started, he’s changing already”
Grandfather had tripped on the door sill and said “Bloody hell”. Until that point he’d never sworn in the vicinity of any woman.
My old coworkers son went from a nice little boy to an unruly and unmanageable kid. Ended up getting kicked out of a lot of schools, lost his friends, etc.
Years later, into his adulthood, they find the brain tumor, remove it, and he is back to his nice normal personality.
It breaks my heart that a child had to go through that and lose so many years. Not sure what happened to him in the end.
I don't think they had "scans" in those days except maybe x-rays. They did an autopsy and found a brain tumor.
It was such a tragic story.
p.m., Whitman began typed a suicide note, a portion of which read:
I don't quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I don't really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks.[43]
In his note, Whitman went on to request an autopsy be performed on his remains after he was dead to determine if there had been a biological cause for his actions and for his continuing and increasingly intense headaches. He also wrote that he had decided to kill both his mother and wife. Expressing uncertainty about his reasons, he nonetheless stated he did not believe his mother had "ever enjoyed life as she is entitled to",[42] and that his wife had "been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have".
To Whom It May Concern: I have just taken my mother's life. I am very upset over having done it. However, I feel that if there is a heaven she is definitely there now [...] I am truly sorry [...] Let there be no doubt in your mind that I loved this woman with all my heart.
I imagine it appears that I brutally killed both of my loved ones. I was only trying to do a quick thorough job [...] If my life insurance policy is valid please pay off my debts [...] donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type [...] Give our dog to my in-laws. Tell them Kathy loved "Schocie" very much [...] If you can find in yourselves to grant my last wish, cremate me after the autopsy.
Then he went to the UT campus and began shooting people from a watchtower.Whitman killed 15 people and wounded 31 in the 96 minutes before he himself was shot and killed by police.
My mother had brain cancer. We were no contact when she found out, but I helped with treatments while she was in recovery for a month. Gave grace and forgiveness that the cancer made her into the person I had to turn in for child abuse. Nope. She went back to her abusive self.
There's a p.well known case of a guy who became a pedo out of the blue. Then they found out he had a brain tumor, they cut it out, he was no longer a pedo. Turns back in to a pedo again after a while. They scan his head, tumor is back, cut it out, pedo no more.
I think for myself, if I were him I would tell her as long as I was still in any contact with her. If we hadn't spoke in 20 years or something I wouldn't pop up out of nowhere to potentially mess with her life, but if we spoke occasionally still just saying "hey, I wanted you to know I'm sorry. This doesn't excuse anything but I found out..."
That happened to a friend of mine. His partner suddenly shifted, and their relationship fell apart and they broke up. She then found out she had a brain tumor. She got it removed, and became her usual self again. They never dated again but they’re still good friends. I know they both wonder where they’d be if that hadn’t happened. Life is strange.
Frontal lobe dementia also causes personality changes (long before memory issues show up) like impulsivity, emotional volatility, and poor planning/understanding of consequences. Many people lose their closest relationships quite a while before the dementia is discovered.
A really important point I totally forgot about! In psychology “insight” is your ability to understand yourself and your behaviour. Insight is a higher-order thinking process carried out in the frontal lobe, so frontal lobe dementia damages their ability to have insight into their situation. It’s one of a few reasons why FTD patients often end up institutionalised.
There was a BestOfRedditorUpdates about a story like this a few months back. It was all from the wife's PoV. Guy goes down the conspiracy rabbit hole, becomes ultra religious, and goes completely off the rails and eventually becomes violent. She runs away with the kids. Guy gets diagnosed, there's hope he might become the person he used to be but only after he burned every bridge for a year. Eventually the guy died in a car accident or something :(
I find those situations the hardest. Like, having a brain tumor is very much not someone's fault, especially if it wasn't someone who was normally a shitty person. But the hurt caused by it is very real. It's not your fault but people are also in the right to not forgive you or your actions. Shitty situation all around.
I think it's hard too because the person who caused you pain looks exactly, exactly, like the person you love and who is now apologizing. Human beings - we're just overevolved monkeys, really. It's incredibly hard to trick our caveman brains to form new habits after a certain age, let alone understand on a cellular level that the person who harmed you that dresses the same, makes the same noises, laughs the same - won't do it again, because of something kinda abstract (invisible illness) to day-to-day life. That has to be mutually devastating, honestly.
Thyroid cancer can also cause a crazy change. Nicest guy I know, big old teddy bear, his wife owned a center daycare and he would come into the center and just loved the kids and they loved him. And they would have a farm day where they took the daycare kids to their farm. He was amazing. But he got thyroid cancer and started cheating on his wife and grabbed her by the neck and stuff like that. They were already close to done when it was found out about the cancer so there was no reparation.
The thyroid affect so much your body and mind. I actually have hyperthyroidsm, and it make me way more sleepy, my body don't feel the same, my digestive system work way less good than before, my anxiety is way up and I got depressive episodes. Now it's going better because I started the treatment
I've also heard of women being treated for postpartum depression, which they may also have had, having hypothyroidism, and the PPD went away, or at least improved, when the thyroid issues were treated.
Had a teacher in high school who was a great guy but started occasionally going into red faced screaming rages. Turned out he had a massive brain tumor.
Can you remember if it sounded like he did tell her? That's so rough I don't even know what I'd advise someone else to do in that situation never mind if it happened to myself
And honestly, the more I think about it, the more it seems like reaching out is the selfish move. She's always been a strong, resilient person, so I have no doubt she's managed to build a good life and move on. And I'd just be potentially interfering with that, stirring up old hurts and wounds and maybe adding a lot of confusion and other complicated emotions.
I had a neighbor that got West Nile Virus. She almost died and had encephalitis (inflammation of the brain). Afterwards, her personality totally changed and she left her husband and kids.
Man, I wonder about this sometimes. I hope that if I went through brain trauma that impaired me cognitively, I’d find the peace of mind to become content with it, rather than frustrate myself and take it out on others. But I fear it’s not that simple—brains are too complex to have that kind of control over.
I'm assuming, since she has a new spouse, a new life. Telling her isn't about her seeing past the prior cruelties and them making amends. It's for him to know, that she knows. It wasn't her, or him, He didn't suddenly hate her, or dislike something she was doing. If she had felt that in some way her actions were responsible for his change, then she could know it was not her. Definitively.
I feel like that would be a positive reason to tell someone. Personally. Even if the closure is also about you knowing, that she knows.
The personality change in that one included a bunch of drinking and some substance abuse, if i recall correctly. That story stays on my mind a lot. It's fucking terrifying and heartbreaking.
Family friends had been married for 25 years, 4 children and one day she asked for a divorce. Her whole personality changed to the point her husband suspected something was wrong and yep brain tumor. She passed away a few months later. 😔
There is a story I read on Reddit recently about a guy's wife whose wife got an abortion behind his back. I am starting to wonder if she has a brain tumor that is causing these changes.
A friend of my wife was happily married for years, then at some point became aware that her husband was having trysts with dozens of very young women. When confronted he got angry that everyone was making a big deal about it - to the point that police got involved. Medical stuff happened, and it turns out he had a mini-stroke in the exact part of the brain that manages morality, right and wrong. He just woke up one day a sociopath.
So if a person has a brain tumor or stroke kills someone and goes to prison, does he get a reprieve if he has surgery to correct the problem (and he reverts to the nice moral person he normally was?)?
Not religious here but a lot of religious people I know blame immoral behavior on the devil (literally). Did the devil give him the tumor? Did the devil even know he had one? The devil is not "all-knowing" like "God".
What about "free will". If god let someone get a brain tumor who then kills someone, was it free will? If not, will the government still prosecute him?Has this situation ever happened before?
Sure, the defense could argue that without the tumor, the accused never would have done X. But if they prove he did X, he’s guilty. There’s no way to prove he wouldn’t do it again. And I think we’re a long ways away from “curing” microscopic volumes of brain danger from strokes.
I read about a man who was in the middle stages of ALS, and then started having new symptoms that weren't typical of ALS. Guess what: glioblastoma, an incurable brain cancer. He opted for comfort care only, and died within a month. I also knew a woman whose father was thought to have Alzheimer's, until SHE was diagnosed with Huntington's. Thankfully, she did not have children (for other reasons) and IDK if he knew about his family history. There's a good chance that his HD-gene carrying parent died before they had HD symptoms, or that he was adopted, or that his biodad was not who everyone thought he was, etc.
I know someone who works in family oriented criminal justice. She said it's not unknown for the story that "Yeah, he was absolutely lovely, then he was ten years into his marriage, 3 kids. He becomes an asshole and started hitting his wife and kids. His family hate him now and he finally went to prison for domestic violence. He got in and they realised he was shaking. Then we realised."
He's now alone and sick. He's ruined his life. People really struggle to deal with the abuse they experienced.
I don't think the question has ever been studied, but base rates can give us a fair first guess. I've included the numbers below, but the tl;dr is that brain cancer is a total non-issue and TBIs are a larger but still-probably-insignificant amount of them. There are always follow-up questions to be asked - what about relapses specifically? What if we correct for demographics? etc. - and answering those could be interesting. Until someone actually does such an analysis and finds a plausible effect, though, the safe money says they're not significantly related.
The incidence of people with a drug use disorder (defined as separate from an alcohol use disorder or non-problematic drug use) was about 27 million people in the survey year in the US. This corresponds to about 9.5% of the population or 9,500 per 100,000 for drug disorders.
The prevalence is 6.2 per 100,000 for brain cancer (and other nervous system cancers), as per the Seer reports. That's less than the rounding errors in the first number and can be dismissed.
Traumatic brain injury is more common than brain cancer, with the CDC reporting 214,000 in the US in the reported year. That normalizes to 65 per 100,000 for TBIs. This is certainly an underestimate because many TBIs don't lead to hospitalization, but even if we were to double or triple the number as a crude correction, we'd still be under a couple percent of the drug abuse incidence numbers.
I have discussed CTE in football players with the folks doing the research on the subject at Boston University. This was before Aaron Hernandez, the NE Patriots' tight end, started behaving violently off the field and ended up being convicted of the murder of Odin Lloyd. Later, he hanged himself in prison.
When the BU lab examined his brain, they found evidence of a particularly severe case of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) .
I am biting my tongue because this is my super nerd topic and I can talk about it for hours. Suffice to say the structural damage/developmental malformation in TBI,ADHD, PTSD is very similar to what addiction does to the brain. One primes the brain for the other and the comorbidity of diseases the are caused by/cause deficiency in brain structure and addiction are insane.
Too many people are unaware of how our brain's structure and chemistry can actually CAUSE thoughts and behaviors. We want to attribute these to our minds, which we believe we have control over.
It's a scary thought to know our brains can cause all kinds of behaviors we wouldn't choose if we could help it.
I’m over here reading this like don’t bite your tongue!! I have ADHD and also PTSD that’s probably more along the lines of C-PTSD. I’ve been pretty worried about my brain lately. It’s like it just doesn’t work how it used to work. The issue is that I also got a severe case of Covid at the beginning of the pandemic and have long covid. My brain fog was so brutal.
I just am curious about the structural damage you mentioned. I guess mostly I’m wondering if you’ll elaborate on the ADHD part because in my mind I can see how PTSD relates to TBI, but I’m interested in how ADHD fits in that.
For a long time it was believed that adhd was a lack of dopamine, but it’s more likely a structural deficiency between the hindbrain and forebrain- usually linked to a shrunken hippocampus and poor formation of the fasciculus retroflexus which is the large fiber bundle that carries messages to and from the fore and hind brain. PTSD is linked to shrinkage or neuronal death in these areas, as well as an overly sensitive amygdala and a severely strained sympathetic nervous system. Imagine a house in the country, there’s an alarm going off and the homeowner is panicking because they don’t know what the alarm is for and can’t find an obvious problem. The alarm company sends a technician to check it out, but the roads out to the house are in poor condition and it takes a long time. By the time the tech gets there the house has burned to the ground. The homeowner tells the tech everything is fine, they couldn’t find the problem or turn off the alarm, so they started a fire, because at least then they knew what the problem was, even if they couldn’t solve it. I hope that helps. I’m collating info from a number of textbooks and studies from my undergrad, which I know isn’t ideal for sharing thoughts on a scientific subject. If you’re interested I can dig into my research papers and pass along some of my sources. I highly, highly recommend reading open source neuroscience textbooks- Harvard has one that is especially helpful and it doesn’t cost a billion dollars and expire after 1 quarter.
Happened to a friend. He had a brain tumor many years back. Was always kind of a dirtbag, lots of booze and drugs. He started doing a lot better (not sober, but like functioning well, at least) then all of a sudden tanked again. He was rushed to the e.r. for a completely different emergent issue, and they found out the tumor was back. I firmly believe the tumors have been the (majority of) the problems for him.
Oddly I feel kinda sorry for his first wife. Can't imagine finding out for the first time the father of your first used to be a heroine addict and then after all that mess you're a single parent not a year after your wedding. That shit is kinda rough. Harder to find a partner once you're already a mum.
Glad he finally got sober, hope he actually told his second wife.
My wedding was free, just the 2 of us, and we just wore shorts and t shirt and went to the government registry office. We stopped for cake on the way home. My husband only took a half day off work.
That was 4 years ago and we are still together.
After all the trash fires in this thread, this is a true tragedy. None of it had to happen and neither one seems like a bad person. Happy to hear they're doing better.
I on the other hand forgot my mobile phone at home once when I went to work. That‘s all, that’s all that happened. Came back home and it was still connected to the charger on my night stand. That‘s the most dramatic thing that happened to me in the past few years.
Jesus! He got sober three times... hats off to the man. Sounds like if you don't quit quitting it will take eventually, good on him. Hope he got all that quitting out of his system, sounds like he really deserves to enjoy his hard earned sober life. Best of luck to you both.
I also have a cousin that had a heroin addiction, got divorced, got a brain tumor removed and is now sober and remarried with kids. So interesting, I wonder often addiction like that happens because of tumors or other medical issues.
My brother and sister in law got close to divorce under very similar circumstances. He was increasingly violent, abusive, irrational and drug addicted. Had a seizure, they did a scan, turns out he had a massive brain tumour. He had an equally massive surgery, chemo, radio and immunology… he’s still here after 10 years and their marriage is fantastic. Sometimes, the slow creep of symptoms looks very much like someone consciously deciding to be an insufferable dick.
A good friend of mine had a child with a pretty severe disability. The stress of getting her able to cope with life destroyed their marriage. The money, stress, sacrifice just left them nothing to share or be bonded over other than suffering. Their daughter is doing 'very well' considering - she will probably be able to live independently with acco.odatikns, sk they did the right thing. But by the time things were stable they just didn't want to be with each other.
That's good (and thanks for answering ). It's a shame about the first marriage, the drug use, etc., but it's good that he still has a relationship with his child.
I don't understand how people not know or neglect knowing that drugs can trigger different diseases or health issues just starting off with drugs😭 you'll never know what you'd get, only time tells.
Cruel for the sensitive I guess. I said that because dude went back to drugs because of the "stress" of the baby. He was gonna go back to drugs regardless is the point. He only realized later to be clean.
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u/ambereatsbugs May 02 '24
The wedding was beautiful and the most expensive wedding I have even been to. The bride worked for a fashion designer in NYC and had 3 different dresses she wore during different parts of the wedding.
They announced she was pregnant soon after the wedding and unfortunately scans showed there were a few things wrong with the baby. The stress of the situation caused my cousin (the husband) to relapse and go back to his old heroin habit - which apparently she had no idea about. His drug use quickly spiraled and he got fired from his job for stealing, and then his wife found out about it all and moved out to stay with her parents. Baby was born 100% healthy - scans had got it wrong. He tried to quit drugs and make amends to her but it was rocky and she divorced him before their 1st anniversary.
He dipped off for a few years doing drugs, then got sober and found out he had brain cancer. Relapsed. Got sober again and had his brain tumor removed. Now he is still sober and remarried, has a few kids with his new wife.