eastcoastbeast
New Member
Hey!
Just started checking out this part of the forum. I am someone who is pretty deeply involvled with medical marijuana, and thought I'd say hello and give a bit of an introduction/start a conversation
The main, underlying reason that I got a prescription is mafuckin' brain cancer. I've got a type 2a astrocytoma, which is a malignant but slow growing tumor. Coming out from that, and having lived with that for over 5 years now, going through surgery, recovery, and chemotherapy I've built up a few other reasons cannabis helps me. Lately I've been working on better understanding how to form a good relationship with cannabis.
My first step was recognizing it in three places in my life: treatment, therapy, and recreation. Each of those needs to be understood and managed on its own terms.
First off, the core, the backbone: treatment.
The best and strongest place I experienced what I consider full on treatment was, as is so often said, during chemo. It helped my body numb its awareness of the discomforts, and helped both my mind and body adjust to eating the way I could and should. I tried different methods, but for body support the best I found was ordering "Snake Oil" from The VDS. It is very clean, high quality hash oil in solution in hemp oil. Edible is a level of physical management above inhalation, and that was pretty solidly taught to me then*. I learned and explored edibles more, and am now getting into making my own.
While they are great, as a medical patient (particularly a cancer patient) you need to be extra careful with what you eat, even above what you smoke. Unless you know and trust the source, I would be cautious about eating at least much of most modern refined products. I use 99% alcohol with a 10+ pass purge and 2 weeks of curing/settling time when I make my own. For making your own, I would suggest starting off with just making it out of bud rather than hash oil. For one, hash oil is easy to make but hard to be 100% safe, and for another if you are new to eating it is very easy to exceed your comfort level with hash oil. Even for making your own, be picky about the cleanliness and quality of what you use. Strength isn't the most important part anymore, confidence of being fully purged and free of any residual chemicals is far higher value.
Edibles are really the only section I bring in, for MYSELF, to the full on treatment. I perceive that term at helping with truly physical and long term ailments. Cancer is the most well known but there are many others that could get value.
I am, for one last part on the treatment, epileptic. I am stable, but highly medicated on prescriptions. My personal doctor doesn't support marijuana as a full treatment for epilepsy. By my personal experience, and for my specific manifestation of epilepsy, I support his opinion. The time it has real value for me in managing my epilepsy is if due to stress/lack of sleep I feel myself nearing my "threshold". In times like that, careful self management can help me avoid a lapse which could impact my life a huge amount long term. Even though my seizures are very minor, driving is a big responsibility. Cannabis helps me a ton with that. The calming, almost meditative methods I have of bringing the tension down... I couldn't do them without smoking some herb. I don't know, and don't really care, if smoking is having a direct physical effect.
So, part two: Therapy.
This is where things get a lot more open, complicated, and awesome.
In terms of what I need help with on a day to day basis to keep myself happy and functioning well, that's what I see as therapy. In this area I have two sides: mental support, and pain management. First I'll start with the mental/psychological side.
Out of my prior life experience/the time I've had living with cancer, I've developed some real issues I have to work at dealing with on a day to day basis. I have hard attacks of PTSD when I'm in high stress periods, I deal with anxiety, I've had a manic episode before in an exceptionally dark period of my chemotherapy, and all this stress and darkness over the years has left me with some work on my hands for anger management. Without cannabis I could not get through my day to day life. First thing in the morning is my favorite, and mosr important time to smoke. I get up, slowly roll one, and let the day come into me slowly. Whether it's after shaking and puking in the toilet the night terrors were so bad, or looking out the window at a sunny day and thinking hopefully of the future, that morning ritual is something I hold onto pretty dearly. It has both the value of the chemicals in the cannabis, but the experience as well.
Later during the day, "dabs" can be a good help for me if I get a serious onset of anxiety/ptsd/whatever the feelings that come out of my body are. Suddenly I can feel like a ghost is in the room, feel cold and almost shiver, and my mind starts trying to come up with dark things to blame it on/fill the gaps... sitting down and doing a dab, I can feel a release of tension in my body. It helps me break the negative mental pattern and start stabilizing myself.
It also has a good background long term support for me in terms of stress/anxiety. It slows me down a bit, it moderates my emotions and even my mind. This can be bad, and if I get back to fully able and the type of work I did before this I'd reduce my intake. But it's not SLOW it's just slower. When your mind is racing too hard because of stress, there is less clarity to it in the end. I might find my mind running over 100 things, but none of them what I should be focusing on. Maybe after the joint I'm slowing down, but more of what I'm thinking of and focusing on is within my control and in a good direction.
It also, definitely, helps moderate my emotions in periods of high stress. If I hadn't had a fat bag of bud after some of my recent experiences... I'd have lost my mind. Some times, a bit of excess to numb the pain might not be so bad. When the world is exploding around me and I need to try to just bounce back, some times a night of excess really has its own values. Whether it is getting high enough to laugh away that dark anger from earlier, or to just take my mind away from the stress it can't do anything with, there are times where fun is therapeutic. It's like a reset button.
I do also have ADHD, and it can really help me with some kinds of work. I do NOT espouse it a solution to ADHD for most students, it has been proven to have impact on short term memory and some other relevant academic strengths. IMO go as long as you can with as little as you can for any drugs (including alcohol). I don't think cannabis has nearly the negative impact of alcohol on young people these days, but I admit to myself in retrospect it didn't help me in school. I think more grown up as I am now I could make it a benefit by saving it for the right times and contexts, but I'm not going back to school.
So last but not least: recreation!
It does exist. We shouldn't all pretend it doesn't. Most of the time my intake is to help me get through the day, but some times it really is to have a fun, goofy night. My only rule for that is paying attention to myself. I treat those nights where I just go to excess like I would treat nights of drinking if I did them now: not too common, not too crazy, and with good friends. It's nice some nights to laugh at B-movies and eat food I wouldn't normally enjoy. But I really would not want to do it every day, and there is a big difference between those nights and my day to day life.
Anyone else is welcome to weigh in, I'd love to hear more opinions. I hope my line of treatment/therapy doesn't feel discrediting to people facing mental illness/psychological/psychiatric issues. Particularly psychiatry, there are areas where it is undeniably a full treatment. I'm personally careful with saving that classification for places where there is a certain and real understanding of what happens, but that is not intended as discredit or skepticism of its value in situations I call "therapeutic".
The idea in my three tier classification is one that shows value to us as patients/users, but also gives a more manageable structure for the medical world to look at. There could be a line to find between those two, which would actually be great for helping health insurance figure out their relationship. Some prescriptions could be covered same as all others, as full medicine, but then there could also be support for the therapy in similar fashions to physiotherapy, psychology, and other forms of support.
I'm a Canadian, and I am waiting, and hoping desperately, for a new system of cannabis that can help me build a more positive relationship, and get rid of parts where I'm even in a legal gray zone!
Just started checking out this part of the forum. I am someone who is pretty deeply involvled with medical marijuana, and thought I'd say hello and give a bit of an introduction/start a conversation
The main, underlying reason that I got a prescription is mafuckin' brain cancer. I've got a type 2a astrocytoma, which is a malignant but slow growing tumor. Coming out from that, and having lived with that for over 5 years now, going through surgery, recovery, and chemotherapy I've built up a few other reasons cannabis helps me. Lately I've been working on better understanding how to form a good relationship with cannabis.
My first step was recognizing it in three places in my life: treatment, therapy, and recreation. Each of those needs to be understood and managed on its own terms.
First off, the core, the backbone: treatment.
The best and strongest place I experienced what I consider full on treatment was, as is so often said, during chemo. It helped my body numb its awareness of the discomforts, and helped both my mind and body adjust to eating the way I could and should. I tried different methods, but for body support the best I found was ordering "Snake Oil" from The VDS. It is very clean, high quality hash oil in solution in hemp oil. Edible is a level of physical management above inhalation, and that was pretty solidly taught to me then*. I learned and explored edibles more, and am now getting into making my own.
While they are great, as a medical patient (particularly a cancer patient) you need to be extra careful with what you eat, even above what you smoke. Unless you know and trust the source, I would be cautious about eating at least much of most modern refined products. I use 99% alcohol with a 10+ pass purge and 2 weeks of curing/settling time when I make my own. For making your own, I would suggest starting off with just making it out of bud rather than hash oil. For one, hash oil is easy to make but hard to be 100% safe, and for another if you are new to eating it is very easy to exceed your comfort level with hash oil. Even for making your own, be picky about the cleanliness and quality of what you use. Strength isn't the most important part anymore, confidence of being fully purged and free of any residual chemicals is far higher value.
Edibles are really the only section I bring in, for MYSELF, to the full on treatment. I perceive that term at helping with truly physical and long term ailments. Cancer is the most well known but there are many others that could get value.
I am, for one last part on the treatment, epileptic. I am stable, but highly medicated on prescriptions. My personal doctor doesn't support marijuana as a full treatment for epilepsy. By my personal experience, and for my specific manifestation of epilepsy, I support his opinion. The time it has real value for me in managing my epilepsy is if due to stress/lack of sleep I feel myself nearing my "threshold". In times like that, careful self management can help me avoid a lapse which could impact my life a huge amount long term. Even though my seizures are very minor, driving is a big responsibility. Cannabis helps me a ton with that. The calming, almost meditative methods I have of bringing the tension down... I couldn't do them without smoking some herb. I don't know, and don't really care, if smoking is having a direct physical effect.
So, part two: Therapy.
This is where things get a lot more open, complicated, and awesome.
In terms of what I need help with on a day to day basis to keep myself happy and functioning well, that's what I see as therapy. In this area I have two sides: mental support, and pain management. First I'll start with the mental/psychological side.
Out of my prior life experience/the time I've had living with cancer, I've developed some real issues I have to work at dealing with on a day to day basis. I have hard attacks of PTSD when I'm in high stress periods, I deal with anxiety, I've had a manic episode before in an exceptionally dark period of my chemotherapy, and all this stress and darkness over the years has left me with some work on my hands for anger management. Without cannabis I could not get through my day to day life. First thing in the morning is my favorite, and mosr important time to smoke. I get up, slowly roll one, and let the day come into me slowly. Whether it's after shaking and puking in the toilet the night terrors were so bad, or looking out the window at a sunny day and thinking hopefully of the future, that morning ritual is something I hold onto pretty dearly. It has both the value of the chemicals in the cannabis, but the experience as well.
Later during the day, "dabs" can be a good help for me if I get a serious onset of anxiety/ptsd/whatever the feelings that come out of my body are. Suddenly I can feel like a ghost is in the room, feel cold and almost shiver, and my mind starts trying to come up with dark things to blame it on/fill the gaps... sitting down and doing a dab, I can feel a release of tension in my body. It helps me break the negative mental pattern and start stabilizing myself.
It also has a good background long term support for me in terms of stress/anxiety. It slows me down a bit, it moderates my emotions and even my mind. This can be bad, and if I get back to fully able and the type of work I did before this I'd reduce my intake. But it's not SLOW it's just slower. When your mind is racing too hard because of stress, there is less clarity to it in the end. I might find my mind running over 100 things, but none of them what I should be focusing on. Maybe after the joint I'm slowing down, but more of what I'm thinking of and focusing on is within my control and in a good direction.
It also, definitely, helps moderate my emotions in periods of high stress. If I hadn't had a fat bag of bud after some of my recent experiences... I'd have lost my mind. Some times, a bit of excess to numb the pain might not be so bad. When the world is exploding around me and I need to try to just bounce back, some times a night of excess really has its own values. Whether it is getting high enough to laugh away that dark anger from earlier, or to just take my mind away from the stress it can't do anything with, there are times where fun is therapeutic. It's like a reset button.
I do also have ADHD, and it can really help me with some kinds of work. I do NOT espouse it a solution to ADHD for most students, it has been proven to have impact on short term memory and some other relevant academic strengths. IMO go as long as you can with as little as you can for any drugs (including alcohol). I don't think cannabis has nearly the negative impact of alcohol on young people these days, but I admit to myself in retrospect it didn't help me in school. I think more grown up as I am now I could make it a benefit by saving it for the right times and contexts, but I'm not going back to school.
So last but not least: recreation!
It does exist. We shouldn't all pretend it doesn't. Most of the time my intake is to help me get through the day, but some times it really is to have a fun, goofy night. My only rule for that is paying attention to myself. I treat those nights where I just go to excess like I would treat nights of drinking if I did them now: not too common, not too crazy, and with good friends. It's nice some nights to laugh at B-movies and eat food I wouldn't normally enjoy. But I really would not want to do it every day, and there is a big difference between those nights and my day to day life.
Anyone else is welcome to weigh in, I'd love to hear more opinions. I hope my line of treatment/therapy doesn't feel discrediting to people facing mental illness/psychological/psychiatric issues. Particularly psychiatry, there are areas where it is undeniably a full treatment. I'm personally careful with saving that classification for places where there is a certain and real understanding of what happens, but that is not intended as discredit or skepticism of its value in situations I call "therapeutic".
The idea in my three tier classification is one that shows value to us as patients/users, but also gives a more manageable structure for the medical world to look at. There could be a line to find between those two, which would actually be great for helping health insurance figure out their relationship. Some prescriptions could be covered same as all others, as full medicine, but then there could also be support for the therapy in similar fashions to physiotherapy, psychology, and other forms of support.
I'm a Canadian, and I am waiting, and hoping desperately, for a new system of cannabis that can help me build a more positive relationship, and get rid of parts where I'm even in a legal gray zone!
