It was like a miracle. Three months before I started chemo, pot and pot products were legalized here in Arizona.
One of the justifications for the legalization was in the medical uses of the plant. My children urged me to go get a state issued medical marijuana card. Despite being utterly healthy, my three daughters all had such cards, issued by some medical professional somewhere in the state of California. They were pros at usage of the substance.
I believe I have previously written about my accidental dosing before my oldest daughter's wedding. There were marijuana products stored in my refrigerator freezer I ate by accident. Who put them there? Unclear, even now, but it would have been one or more of the three people I have sired who felt that being stoned at the wedding was a good idea.
Believe it or not, even as a parent, I hold no judgment. My children are all adults. Back in the day I myself would down 3 or 4 beers and/or mixed drinks at a wedding, which for me would induce some significant drunkenness. Adults should get to choose their method of intoxication. Just don't bring the law down on me.
Like most college kids, I "experimented" with various drugs. I found solice in none of it. In fact, I could not understand why the effects would be pleasurable for any human. I found them psychologically troubling. Perhaps philosophically troubling. If reality is that fungible, what permanence does it hold? Of what value is engagement in this consentual existence? (I had several non-drug induced experiences that made me feel the same way. I think there's a lot of exploration we can do psychically without chemical aides that bring the same weirdness to the fore. )
Up to January 2021 my personal experience with THC intoxication had been utterly negative. I did not feel euphoric. I felt psychotic, or at least what I imagine psychosis would feel like. And I discovered the medical fact that THC is a stimulant. It made my heart race and elevated my BP. Consequently, the impact is that I would descend into a horrifying dread much more significant that simple paranoia. It wasn't for me.
But here I was staring chemo in the face. Second week of February, Wednesday and Thursday, would be my first treatment time. Side effects? Well, I was told they vary from person to person. I might lose my hair - not a given with Bendeka/Rituxan. I would suffer some amount of nausea. Brain fog. Gastrointestinal issues.
The oncologist was light hearted about it. He had given me 3 treatment options. The length and severity of the treatments varied widely. There was chemo and a pill, which would have minimal side effects. The chemo part would only last 3 months but I'd have to take the pill for the rest of my life.
Then there was a year long, milder chemo.
Finally there was the 6 month version, with more significant effects but more definite predicted results.
Of course, me being me, said: "Hit this thing as hard as you can," or something stupid like that. Stupid. Really. I had no clue what I had requested. But the doc knew, and he smiled and said, "Done!" So I was set up for mid Feb, 2021.
It wasn't until I was in the treatment chair, with an IV stuck in my arm (no, I did not get a port), that the severity of my choice would come clear. It's the RNs in the treatment room, not the doc, who give you the true skinny on chemo and the effects.
It was clear to them that this would work. Once a month, usually the third week, I would be given infusions over Wednesday and Thursday. My body would not be able to endure more than that. On Wednesdays I would be in treatment for nine hours being infused with various chemicals. Turns out they have to give you all sorts of things along with chemo to keep you from dying right there and then. The second day I would be there for only two hours, receiving my final dose.
It would work. But I would suffer.
It was Heather, my primary chemo-giver who told me, "Your feet will remain on THIS side of the ground."
I have been repeating that to myself ever since.
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There is nowhere more depressing than a cancer treatment center. If there is an opposite to a beach in the summer, or a kids's playground, or Disneyland - it's a cancer treatment ward.
God bless all those women I sat with receiving drugs for breast or uterine cancers. They had it much worse than me. They get an infusion of thick syrupy stuff the RNs called the red bullet. It looks exactly like fruit punch. And not a single one of those women had a single hair on their heads, and their skin was pale. And they all wore custom knitted hats. Many of them knitted while they sat there being infused with that deadly poison.
Heather had Spotify on her phone. She played 70's music for us through a bluetooth speaker. We would hear old Gordon Lightfoot songs or Cool and the Gang. One of us would say, "I haven't heard this since high school." One of us would say, "This was the song they played at my senior prom."
We remembered life. We remembered when we had a seeming infinity of time in front of us.
God bless the college-age kids who were in there, wondering what life held for them.
God bless the men enduring a recurrence of lymphatic cancer, or metastasized pancreatic cancer.
I don't know how many of them are still alive now, a year later.
But we sat there in that room, month after month, like some sort of book club. Some sort of club none of us wanted to be part of.
And the horror for me - a realization that as bad as the rest of them looked to me, I was the same. I was part of that club.
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An Aside:
I have written this before but I will write it again.
People like to say to and about cancer patients: "How brave." And "What a brave fight." And he/she "fought cancer valiantly."
Holy mother of god.
There is no bravery. There is only fear. There is only pain. If we could escape this by retreating - all of us would. Seriously, show me a coward's way out, and I will take it.
We are not brave. We are struggling to survive.
A scientist in Antarctica said to me: "Life wants to live." Think about it. Think about a fly you just swatted that's twitching before you, struggling to flap its wings to buzz around your head again. Think about the fish you just landed that's flopping on the deck of your fishing boat. Things want to live, and you see it best when they are dying.
That's how I feel. Like a landed fish. Hook still in his throat. Flopping as hard as I can. Searching for the ocean. Praying it's right there, just out of sight.
End Aside:
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I took a lot of meds to counteract the effects of chemo. Lots of times I took more than prescribed. Mostly, they worked.
But there is no 100% in medicine. There's only statistics. And statistically speaking, the meds made chemo living much more tolerable.
But under no circumstances was I "back to normal." And it doesn't seem like there will be a "return to normal" for me.
So I am not expecting any miracles.
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Except - marijuana. Mary jane. Pot. Weed. Kush. Now legal and available here in my own neighborhood. According to the growers - a miracle cure.
I did not get a medical marijuana card. I was too embarrassed to ask for one. I'm sure they would have given one to me.
But like a teenager going to the drugstore to buy condoms for the first time - I was too embarrassed to ask my oncologist for one.
Seriously. Facing a possibly terminal illness, I let pride and ego stand in the way.
So I did not get a medical card.
(Even now I tell myself - all it would do is save me the sales tax. I can buy exactly the same stuff without a medical card. I just have to pay AZ state tax.)
Because I still have some financial means I go to my dispensary and spend. Sometimes hundreds per week. I don't know what the legal limit is for buying THC products. I haven't hit it yet. And I buy a lot.
Oddly, to this day do not like the effects of THC. But I forced myself to endure them. I got to the point where THC effects are familiar and not threatening. I have made myself so stoned I could not hold a train of coherent thought. I have become so intoxicated that I could not tell time, nor could I remember how I got to where I was standing. Seriously, I became one of the stoners I used to laugh about in college. I was the A student. They were going to flunk out.
Yeah. that was me.
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And does it work? Does pot alleviate the misery of chemo?
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No.
It pains me to say that. But truth is truth. It does not relieve the pain. It does not alleviate the nausea. It just makes you silly. And silly people endure pain better than serious, troubled people. (By the way, I think the same of opiates. They don't relieve the pain as much as they make you stupid and thus more likely to be oblivious to pain.)
I wish I could say something more positive about it. But my experience is that the nausea and the psychological truth of becoming a "cancer patient" where before I was a skiier and a mountain biker and a guy who could military press his own weight, 3 reps. Now I'm shorter (I am 1.25" shorter than I was while healthy.) And my muscle mass has declined severely. (I have trouble lifting 40lb bags of dog food.)
Marijuana doesn't help with any of that.
It improves my appetite, which is crucial for chemo patients, who have almost no appetite at all and need to gain weight to survive. And it does help me sleep. Both good things. So there is something.
And it makes me silly. My wife likes the silly me better than the morose, self-pitying me. She likes the me who is gaining weight and no longer seeming like someone just out of the Gulag.
So I still keep a healthy stock of THC products. (The edibles - with my lung issues I couldn't possibly smoke anything.) I'm glad I can get them. If I didn't have them, I'd have to get more prescription sleeping pills and more Ativan. Weirdly, I have started to look like those stoners at the head shop I knew in college. My hair is past my shoulders (celebration that I didn't lose my hair during chemo). As we have all been in lockdown these past years, and working exclusively from home, I don't dress business casual anymore. I wear t-shirts and flannel. I have to keep a knit hat on my head to keep the hair out of my eyes. I have a beard, which is mostly white now. I look like an old hippy, and when I go into the dispensary I am the oldest guy there by 2 or 3 decades. All the young people in there smile and try to relate to me. But they are younger than my children. I don't have much to say.
I go home with my THC laden gummies and chocolates and rice krispy treats and sodas, pop the top off a soda, take a swig, and go on with my day, waiting for the sillyness to start, and the cancer to move aside for just a while.
While it did not work as well as prescription meds, I am happy for it. I will say it made things better.
Your mileage may vary.