It's unfortunately not that unheard of. In a healthy person, cancer can sometimes initiate, grow, and spread throughout the body without disturbing any vital processes for quite some time. People often don't find out they have this kind of cancer until they become sick. Some cancers can grow at rates close to exponential, so once it is bad enough to make you sick by its own effects, every minute without treatment is bad news.

Fortunately, most cancers reveal themselves early as lumps here or there, or skin-spots, or as a migraine-like headache, or loss of appetite, or intestinal ...problems, but many miget start hidden and stay hidden until they metastasize and spread to vital organs. In general, the "this is bad" sign is when you find it has spread to the lymph nodes and/or lungs/brain. That usually means time is short barring successful experimental treatment or quite good luck.

The Lifetime-movie-style "you have one month to live, tops, do you want to get sick at home or sicker on chemo here?" line is not as uncommon as we'd hope it would be.

For the devious sake of nurturing conspiracy theory however, I guess you could fake it by telling the person they had cancer, giving them chemo to sap their immune system, then actually giving them cancer by injecting them with immortal tumor cells... I mean... we can do it with mice... That'd be one hell of a scheme. They should publish.

^ as he said. Not all shit that happens is good. Not all bad shit was planned by Evil.

It's odd though that he became sick exactly the day after he got news that he would get a re-trial of his conviction for murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Of course he was the real shooter of Oswald, but maybe someone was afraid he would testify about some mitigating factor, like duress.

Stress is a powerful thing. Perhaps the most powerful and unpleasant quality of high stress is its ability to very well suppress the immune system. That's the reason why folks tend to get sick when they are stressed. It is actually a proven cause of reactivation of several viruses that we live with all our lives... for example, The Herp. hehe. If you are one of the millions who have HSV, you'll get a "cold sore" or with HSV-2 a "personal breakout" if you are overstressed any time.

I would not be surprised at all if his sudden stress caused his immune system to fail and his cancer to advance rapidly. With no immune system, cancer is a VERY FAST KILLER!! The body has a natural defense to cancerous cells, but if the immune system is weakened... no guarantees...

Stress KILLS folks. Resolve it.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Yes, sudden onset cancer is not that uncommon- especially in Russian reporters, Florida election investigators and CIA backed patsies.

Sometimes they even skip the onset and go directly to death.