Monday, July 8, 2013

The Dude Abides!

If you've been reading along you know that my morale has not been attaining any new heights recently. I've had kind of a grim attitude. Just suck it up and get through it.

Two weeks ago when I was awake in the middle of the night with serious stomach discomfort I decided that a little medical marijuana might be called for. Well, by that I mean I would have killed for some.

Marijuana for medical purposes was recently legalized in Massachusetts. However, the Health Department has not yet finalized the rules regarding dispensaries so there is no place to legally buy it yet.

I put out some feelers and the grapevine worked its thing and a couple days later I received the gift of a single large joint for testing purposes.

It so happened that it was the evening on which I had a rapid bloom of painful thrush - a yeast infection in the mouth. My mouth went from fine to feeling scalded in about two hours. I tried a little of the weed that night but the smoke was very painful on my mouth.

Mission aborted.

It took a while for the thrush to clear and then I was distracted with other things like surgery. I sort of forgot about the weed until today. I've been in such a funk that as soon as I remembered I had it I decided to give it a proper try.

In case you're not in the know about pot, its cultivation has been highly optimized over the past couple of decades and the pot of today is orders of magnitude more potent than that of the 60s and 70s. I didn't want to over do it. I took a couple of medium tokes.

A few minutes later I was feeling quite good. I wasn't doing it for the high (remember my earlier comments about preferring my consciousness unaltered these days?) but I have to admit the high during the first hour or so was fun.

But the most dramatic effect was on my mood. Like night and day. I suddenly felt calm and optimistic and not stressed. It's been a while since I haven't felt stressed. It's a huge relief.

It also removed the constant stomach discomfort that has been present seemingly forever. More relief.

Since pot is known to increase appetite (i.e. "the munchies") I wondered if it would change my food experience at all. It did! It didn't make things magically taste normal, but it did turn down the "bad" taste significantly, or at least make me not care about it as much. I've eaten more solid food today then on any of the past several days. That's still not much, mind you, but enough that my stomach has felt satisfied.

I actually enjoyed the trip into Boston for my daily radiation appointment. I was so happy to be feeling better that I probably seemed weirdly bouncy to the radiation techs.

It's eight hours later as I write this and I'm still feeling so much better than I have been the past few days. The dude abides very well presently.

The only drawback is that my mouth is going to get worse and worse from this point on, and smoke is a major irritant of a sore mouth. So I need to find a different route of administration. I'm researching. Apparently there are a wide variety of products available in other locations. Specifically Washington State, which recently legalized marijuana even for recreational use. I've heard of lozenges. I need to figure out how to obtain some non-smoked forms of this miracle drug.

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