The Chronic Pain Excuse
Pain is no defense for murder.
The media world has been positively obsessed with the recent shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. On December 4, Thompson was murdered in cold blood on the streets of midtown Manhattan in broad daylight by a masked assailant who shot him multiple times in the back. He was on his way to a shareholder meeting at the time, and tragically leaves behind a wife and two children. This is what matters in this horrible story: the fact that a self-made man who rose through hard work to the top of the American corporate ecosystem was shot down simply for the fact of his existence. His loss was a tragedy, not a cause for celebration or the spark for a hard conversation about the state of the American healthcare system.
The man who killed Thompson will not be named in this piece, as notoriety is exactly what he was looking for when he decided to carry out this atrocious and indefensible act of political terrorism. And that is what this killing was, a naked act of terroristic violence, explained away by a childlike understanding – and hatred – of the American health insurance system. The killer was no downtrodden blue-collar worker who was kicked unceremoniously off his insurance by a greedy profiteer. He was, instead, the Ivy League-educated scion of a highly wealthy family that owned country clubs and had its name on university buildings. He was no hero of the proletariat. He was an entitled rich brat with a violent megalomaniacal fantasy life. He deserves no sympathy, no defense, and certainly no laudatory treatment from anyone with even half a working brain.
What is most galling to me are the raft of sympathetic stories about the murderer’s apparent issues with chronic pain. According to media reports, he suffered from a back condition akin to a slipped disc, making him unable to function as a normal 26-year-old would. He complained of chronic back pain, sciatica, and brain fog as a result of his condition. A former roommate said that “His back pain impacted every aspect of his life, his relationships and romantic connections. The constant pain led to depression, which further affected those relationships.” This sob story was repeated by several outlets, with some explicitly arguing that the “the U.S. healthcare system often makes things worse,” tacitly approving of the killer’s actions. The linking of this man’s pain to the murder itself has been a frequent refrain of various press outlets, crafting something of an excuse for the man’s horrendous immoral act.
But this narrative is far too pat and fails to stand up to any real scrutiny. In fact, the killer posted online about a spinal surgery he underwent – paid for by insurance – that relieved the vast majority of his pain. He even advocated for other sufferers to seek the same procedure, which goes directly against the idea that he was somehow shortchanged by his health insurance and turned into a killer by his overwhelming chronic pain. Even if he had not gained the relief provided by the surgery he underwent, chronic pain is no excuse for cold-blooded murder. Trust me, I know.
I don’t usually write personal essays, but this is a deeply personal subject for me. And the presentation of chronic pain as not only debilitating, but a rationale or cause for the targeted, cold-blooded murder of a healthcare executive, has made me very angry. Time for a story.
I suffer from chronic pain and have for more than a decade now. I have had daily migraine headaches since the summer of 2013, when I suffered a terrible medical event that changed my life forever. I was, at the time, an auditor and CPA well on my way to making a successful career in the field. I had clients across a variety of industries and thoroughly enjoyed learning how each sector and company operated. I also loved the travel opportunities; my primary client at the time was based in Israel and I had the chance to spend a good deal of time in that wonderful nation. All in all, despite the stress of the job, life was pretty darn good. I was a healthy, happy 23-year-old with a lot to look forward to. All of that changed in an instant.
On a flight from New York to Munich, where I was planning to take a few days of vacation before heading to Tel Aviv for a hardcore quarter-end work trip, I experienced what was, at that point, the worst pain of my life. All of a sudden, it felt like multiple people were smashing my brain with sledgehammers, stabbing my eyes with ice picks, and doing everything they could to explode my skull from both the inside out and the outside in. It was a feeling that, even as a professional writer, I struggle to describe in words. Suffice it to say, I wouldn’t even wish it on my worst enemy. I had had headaches that grew increasingly painful over the previous week, but nothing all too concerning. This, on the other hand, was very concerning. The three days I spent in Munich are almost entirely lost to my memory. Thankfully, I took lots of photos on my phone, and that is basically the only way I recall any specifics from that sojourn. What I do remember is the intense, unremitting pain, the inability to sleep, the failure to keep any sort of food down, and the genuine fear I felt about the situation.
Another thing I distinctly recall is the four hour flight from Munich to Tel Aviv; not because I did anything particularly special, but because I immediately surpassed my previous pain record, set just a few days earlier. When I finally made it to my hotel, I knew something was supremely wrong, but I had no idea what. And that was a terrifying feeling. I had the basic understanding that I needed to get medical attention as soon as possible, but I could not fathom being stuck in a hospital in a foreign country with nobody there to help me but my busy co-workers. I had no qualms about the Israeli health system, but it was thousands of miles from home. I made the decision to fly back home to the US the next day. Once again, I broke my pain record on that 13-hour-long flight – this time seemingly for good. That plane ride was the worst experience of my life. It felt like I was dying a slow, painful death 35,000 feet above the Atlantic, with nearly no end in sight. I couldn’t eat, sleep, read, or do anything but sit with the intense agony that seemed to be a permanent resident inside of my skull.
Once I got back, I had my first of myriad MRIs. I could tell that I was correct in my assessment that something was badly wrong by the faces of the MRI techs and the call I received from my doctor within 10 minutes of leaving the facility. It turned out that I had a pituitary tumor that had exploded and hemorrhaged on the flight to Germany and was, at the time, bleeding profusely inside of my head. Shockingly enough, I was lucky that it burst when it did; had it continued growing the way it was, it would’ve impacted my optic nerve and left me permanently blind. So, in retrospect, the way it worked out was one of the better outcomes available to me. Surgery was not an option, as the tumor bled out before any operation could be carried out. I was left with a seriously damaged pituitary gland, significant internal head trauma, and a chronic illness that I have dealt with ever since.
I had to go on disability, leave my job as an auditor, and totally reassess my life and career. Not only the choices I would make, but the far-smaller universe of potential options available to me. Given the fact that I was largely unable to use computers, was super sensitive to external stimuli, and had about 20 days per month in which I was nigh-bedridden, this was a challenge. I was deeply depressed and bereft, trying to understand what my life would look like going forward. I cycled through what felt like dozens of doctors and even more treatments, from cranial injections and nerve blocks, to magnetic pulses and pretty much every pill under the sun. The side effects were brutal, but the headache pain was even worse. I tried everything. Some treatments reduced the pain temporarily, but none ended it entirely. It certainly didn’t help that my migraines were triggered primarily by humidity and precipitation, things that I had no control over and that tended to be fairly bad in New Jersey.
I was told I wouldn’t be able to work in anything like a normal way ever again. I was told that I would have to be tied to painful medical treatments for the rest of my life. I was told that I would likely be unable to have children. And yet, I decided to keep going. It was brutally hard, full of pain and suffering, and did lead to trouble in personal relationships. I was, at times, a shell of a human. It sucked. But I kept trying. I shifted to different medications, leaned on my wife, family, and friends, and worked around my disability. I ended up finding the callings – writing and history – that evaded me beforehand, and I worked my ass off to get a graduate degree, break into a profession from scratch, and build my writing skills through lots of practice. I got married, bought a house, and, thank God, had a beautiful daughter. And I moved across the country to find a suitable climate where I could heal and be a better version of myself – as husband, father, and writer.
You know what I never even considered? Murdering an innocent health insurance executive because I was angry about the hand that life had dealt me. Why not? Well, because I’m not a sociopath who takes his own problems out on the rest of society.
Maybe the folks who are excusing this evil murderer’s actions should think about the kind of thing they are incentivizing – and the alternatives to brutal criminality that just happen to be far more beneficial to society and the individual.