What I don’t get is why these geniuses claim such rare and/or incurable cancers instead of common (yet deadly) ones that would be much more believable?
I've been thinking a lot about Victoria lately, given the recent kuru-konfusion. She's strange, and not in the way all munchies are strange. There's no one else quite like her, and that says a lot in a subculture where even intellectually disabled women dying of treatment-resistant epilepsy have skinwalkers.
People who get colloquially tagged munchies are often people with a thick soup of physiological, psychogenic, malingered, and iatrogenic issues colliding. Victoria usually doesn't seem like those people, but nor does she seem like the people with classical Munchausen's syndrome (e.g. Paige). It's been said before that she "doesn't seem to understand what diseases are or what they do to you". Most munchies (of whatever stripe) are very interested in medicine, they research on their own time, they want to sound at least plausible enough to convince other laymen, they get jobs in healthcare ranging from 'CNA' to 'failed med student who ends up a CNA'. Victoria does not understand medicine, nor does she care to research it. It's not helped by the fact her past is such a cipher. We don't know who she was before she was Victoria Guyadeen, Crazy Munchie. Even the pics of her face pre-steroids are a rarity.
I wondered at first if it was just "munchie + dumb", if the issue was confounded by the people who put up better fronts than her just being academically smarter and more able to understand what they research. But Victoria's claims are weird in ways that aren't purely explainable by low intelligence. Your everyday Dunning-Kruger, knowledge-stops-at-middle-school-biology, low IQ brainlet would laugh at you for saying your identical twin gave you a third set of genes. Dumb people know people who have cancer go to cancer doctors and can Google words they don't know like "kuru" and "Morgellons". She also, by self-report, gets called out pretty explicitly by doctors compared to most people suspected of faking, like they find her so much more obvious than any other obvious munchie, and like they find it particularly urgent she gets a psych consult compared to anyone else with a mental disorder that, let's remind people, can result in you dying horribly and painfully at a young age with little advance warning.
It's like she has some kind of somatic delusion. The conjoined twin idea and the universe she's built around it isn't ordinary munchie stuff, and she doesn't present as somebody concerned with medical science outside her own head. It's bizarre in nature and it looks grafted on even from the vantage point of not knowing her premorbid personality. But, exactly because we don't know her premorbid personality, it's hard to tell.
) of our sad walrus. Apparently she now has a mrsa infested ulcer on her thigh and the muscle tissue around it is dead. As of seven hours ago she still had both of her legs. Poor little Paige, not even getting a cool amputation out of her surgery.
