In stark contrast to my last post on Christianity and faith, this post will be about marijuana. Similarly controversial to faith, but much more fun for me to write about, I’m tempted to say marijuana played an almost equally important roll in his cancer battle. This is something we didn’t talk about with most people during his treatment and I never mentioned it on CaringBridge for a number of reasons. For starters, it wasn’t legal at the time. In addition, I think there was a part of us that didn’t want to worry about the judgement. Meh, whatever. Judge away, if you wish. But regardless of your feelings on marijuana use and its legalization, I will make the bold statement that I believe it extended Mike’s life.
About a week into starting PLX (the clinical trial drug), Mike started to feel a little better. He was keeping some food down and his pain got a little better. Our levels of anxiety eased slightly. It all started that day he got some IV fluid and ate a bunch of snacks then went to Didiers. It was as if the medication all of a sudden shrunk a tumor enough that he got some relief. He would throw up every couple of days instead of 3 or 4 times per day. Mike was able to decrease his pain medication dose over the next few days from Oxycontin 120mg every 8 hours to Oxycontin 20mg every 8 hours. That’s a shocking reduction. As a result, he was more alert and we did more things together during the day. We borrowed someone’s old Nintendo (from the 80’s) because it’s my favorite gaming system, and we’d play Mario Bros. and Mike Tyson Punch Out to pass the time. We borrowed a friend’s juicer and we would try all different types of vegetable and fruit combinations. We were trying (key word: trying) to have Mike eat an all organic and mostly raw diet in hopes that maybe it could have some benefit in cancer (despite the science that says it doesn’t), since he could eat a bit more and keep it down.
On May 22nd, we went to Chewelah to watch Mike’s niece’s softball game. It was a sunny day, so Mike was wearing a hat and his UV long-sleeve shirt to protect him from the sun. About ten minutes into sitting there, Mike’s exposed skin on his hands, face, and neck started feeling like they were frying and itching severely. We left immediately and at home, we had to put ice packs on him because he felt like he was on fire. That was our first and last experience with PLX’s side effect of extreme sun sensitivity. For the next few days, Mike had a nasty rash on the tops of his hands, but a new healthy glow to his face that he didn’t have before. He avoided the sun like the plague after that.
Later that same day, a friend delivered Mike a little “starter kit” for experimenting with seeing if marijuana helped his symptoms. They lent us a vaporizer, a grinder, a little pot, and some tinctures and edibles to try. A vaporizer provides a way of inhaling marijuana without smoking it, so it’s easier on the lungs and more discreet. Neither Mike or I had smoked pot since high school or maybe once or twice in college before we got together. We never had a problem with other people doing it, in fact I think the majority of people I’ve known my whole life have smoked it. I am, in fact, from Stevens County. We just weren’t really that into it personally. But Mike was fully willing to try anything that might help the pain or nausea and help him eat. He didn’t really like the big vaporizer so I went and bought some rolling papers for Mike and clumsily rolled him a joint. He lit that thing up and hopped on the golf cart, driving down the driveway to the shop to visit his dad and brother-in-law, with a joint hanging out of his mouth. It was an interesting scene, his parents’ kitchen table covered in pot smoking paraphernalia all the time.
From that point on, Mike used marijuana pretty regularly. For the sake of legality, he got a doctor’s
recommendation letter for medical marijuana, that way there was no anxiety about getting in trouble. In the beginning, he would use the sublingual tincture or smoke joints. He’d wake me up at 3 am because he felt restless and a sense of impending doom, a dark anxiety that he couldn’t explain, but felt more tormented by than any physical symptoms. I’d get up with him, we’d go upstairs, sit at the table, I’d roll him a joint, and then he’d smoke himself back into relaxation mode. Then Mike invested in a small portable vaporizer that could be recharged and plugged into the cigarette lighter of the car.
The vaporizer became as ubiquitous in our lives as the plastic bag-lined garbage can and Tupperware of medications that went everywhere with us. Mike needed the vaporizer because it allowed him to not puke. He would grind up the pot with the grinder, put it in the chamber, then the vaporizer heats it up enough that it doesn’t burn but emits the most fragrant sweet smelling vapor I’ve ever smelled. Then the vapor is sucked out of the mouthpiece on top. The resulting singed herb is dumped out. I made Mike an “ash-container” out of an old Fiber One cardboard box. That box also accompanied us everywhere and the bottom would be filled with brown, burnt pot after it was dumped out of the chamber.
Before any meal, there was this long drawn out process of Mike cleaning the vaporizer, then loading it, using it, eating, then cleaning and reloading and reusing the vaporizer so he could keep down what he just ate. Using the vaporizer pre-meal was for the appetite, and using the vaporizer post-meal was to prevent the nausea from making it all come back up again. The pot made a huge difference in Mike’s quality of life. It literally made him capable of eating, keeping food down, and hence not losing as much weight and wasting away as quickly as he would have otherwise. When he started PLX, he had lost 20 pounds in a little over a month since checking out of the hospital. With the help of PLX and smoking pot, he was able to gain back at least 10 pounds over the next month or so. You can’t argue that it was only PLX that helped him to gain the weight back though, because on the days when Mike didn’t use marijuana, it was a struggle for him to force down a couple carrots or peas. He had NO appetite. But when he smoked, he could down half a pizza, often to his detriment. When he was smoking, he had no restraint for how much he ate. Later on, as the cancer in his liver grew and his liver took up far more space in his abdomen, any overeating resulted in extreme pain and discomfort. So he could smoke, eat a huge meal, and feel fine while he was eating, but then the next day he would’t be able to eat one bite and his abdomen would hurt so bad he could barely move. Mike would regret his binge from the night before horribly.
And frankly, the anxiety relief both Mike and I received from his using pot was a welcome respite from the 24/7 panic. Mike sometimes felt like when he smoked, it took him away from the reality of his cancer battle, making it less of a spiritual experience. He essentially stopped thinking about what he was facing when he was high, and he felt like that was detracting from the learning experience and spiritual enlightenment that he was meant to go through. I understood what he meant, but when he smoked, it was a welcome break for both of us. Not only did he relax and become his funny, silly old self, I was able to take a mental break. I wanted him to do whatever he needed both physically and/or emotionally, but I admit, the second he’d pull out the vaporizer, I felt relief wash over me. My funny, carefree husband would come back. He wasn’t talking about life and death and fear, he was cracking jokes. It gave my heart and mind a much needed hiatus from coping with both of our fear. And it wasn’t like Mike was walking around stoned out of his mind all the time. He used it mainly during meals. And in a similar sense to narcotic pain relievers, when used to treat a symptom, the high and euphoria is practically absent.
People were so kind and helpful during that time. There were many friends and family who gave Mike pot during that time for free and we greatly appreciated it. They helped us get it wherever we went. Whenever we had to travel, we always had to find creative ways of getting it for Mike and some of those stories will come up eventually. Like the time we buried a stash in the ground in front of the UCLA Medical Center hotel for later retrieval.
I wrote about this because it was a big part of the story and for the sake of completeness, it couldn’t be left out. But more importantly, while a lot of people understand the medicinal benefits of marijuana, others do not. I’m frustrated by anyone who thinks it should not be available to a sick patient for medical purposes. They obviously don’t know anything about it. And for anyone suggesting a patient should take Marinol (the prescription pill form of THC) instead, I can assure you it is not the same and did not even have a fraction of the efficacy that real marijuana had for Mike. Obviously, the medical marijuana thing has been abused and basically made into a joke in places like California. All you have to do is walk down Venice Beach to see how anyone and everyone is solicited to come into the numerous “doctors’ offices” to sign up for a Green Card every 20 feet. It’s a little ridiculous. They might as well just legalize it in California, and stop pretending like it’s for medical use.
Anyways, I truly believe without the marijuana, Mike would have lost an incredible amount of weight very rapidly, and his body would have shut down faster. I am extremely grateful for our ability to have had access to it so easily while he was sick. No one should be denied the choice or ability to try something so effective for pain, nausea, and appetite if they so desire. So I hope if you were opposed to it before, you can at least see the application of marijuana from a medical standpoint now.
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