Feb 09
25
Tennessee Woman Fakes Breast Cancer
A Tennessee woman has been arrested for fraud on charges that she lied about having breast cancer for several years to her employer and coworkers. Lying about an illness is actually a psychological disorder that has a name to it, but what it is I can’t remember, and it definitely is something that needs to be addressed by therapy, which this woman is smart enough to get as she has stated in a letter to her coworkers apologizing for the lie and saying she does not know why she continued to lie about having breast cancer for years.
It may be a need for sympathy, from a psychological standpoint. I know there is also a variation of this illness where parents actually make their children sick in order to gain sympathy, even to the point of killing their children for sympathy (have you ever seen the Sixth Sense, this is what happened to the girl that Hayley Joel Osment’s character keeps seeing in the dark, she’s trying to tell him that her mother slowly poisoned her and that is why she ended up dying).
The woman from Tennessee is 38 years old and was arrested after it was discovered that she was not undergoing treatment for breast cancer as she had claimed. The sad part is she had falsely played on the sympathy of her coworkers and collected hours and hours of paid sick leave that were donated by those that felt a duty to help her out with her treatments and time needed off due to her illness, and she also accepted cash donations from some under these false pretenses.
It is unclear who started to be suspicious or how it was discovered that she had been fabricating the breast cancer story for years in order to get paid time off and sympathy from coworkers and perhaps others who weren’t in the know, but she was arrested and will be brought on charges. Apparently she really did have breast cancer which was diagnosed back in 2000, but after radiation therapy, she was declared cancer free just a year or two later, and it has never come back, so it’s almost like she just kept perpetuating the illness after she was no longer sick.
