In this entry, it will show you the “night and day” difference between the same patient (ME 🙂 ) and using medical marijuana instead of opiates that did NOT work well for me. Instead of starting this diary entry at the evening time like Diary Entry #1 was started, I am able to start this at the beginning of the day because of the way that it affects me. Here it is without further introductions of what it is, a simple diary entry I wrote for myself before to remind me of the differences so that I don’t forget what an impact medical marijuana has on my body.
This is the start of the day
6 a.m. – Alarm goes off to start the day. My eyes open, I turn my head to reach for the phone alarm and I absorb the pain that comes with that movement. Today, my shoulders and neck feel like I just got a wooden twig branch jammed in between the vertebrae in my neck and spine near the top of the shoulder blades. I quietly groan so I do not wake up my wife. Her alarm is not for 30 more minutes. I literally roll until my legs fall off of the bed and hit the carpetted floor under/next to the bed.
I grab my portable vaporizer that holds metered THC doses of approximately 73% THC in each dose. I immediately take in ONE metered dose. I hold it for 5 seconds (science has PROVEN that holding your breathe to try to get more THC in your body does NOT work. Your lungs will absorb all the THC in the dose that it can within 5 seconds. If you hold your breath longer, you are not helping injest THC but at that point making yourself aphixiated and searching for oxygen in your blood stream over the air. It WILL make you light-headed and dizzy if you do this (hold your breath with smoke in your lungs that is). You can get all you need in the few seconds of holding it in.
I wait a couple of minutes, no more than 3, before I get up off of the bed. I attempt to stretch and that as usual HURTS to do then. I go get my “morning meds”. The opiates that have been prescribed to me daily as an attempt to make my days liveable. That is not enough to kill the pain that I have (even at the high doses they give me). I take my new bottle of water out of the fridge. It is 32 oz. I grab one of these EVERY morning when I wake up. THIS is MY coffee (for the most part, I do drink Iced coffee later in the day) for the morning. I take one of my hard candy edibles that is treated with BOTH CBD and THC. This particular one is “Lucky Lemon”. I LOVE lemon tasting candies (the sour is what gets me) and I take that outside with me. I ALSO grab a cookie from my pre-made, (literally locked up with a combination lock,) batch of medicated chocolate chip cookies that are made weekly out of strains that are available. When you have the right combination of strains, they make for “SUPER cookies” and I stash a couple of those for the “Bad Days”. I then go to my rocking chair in the backyard. I eat my cookie, put the candy in my mouth and take ONE more pull on my vaporizer. Sometimes though I do take up to 4-5 metered doses in this little time frame between 6 and 6:30 a.m..
6:30 a.m. – I turn on the coffee pot for the wife to wake to. I read the morning news through my smart phone as I let the medicine do its magic in me. I have already felt the vaporizer when I got up (in the few minutes on the bed sitting). Once I take the 2nd metered dose, I FEEL the pain level start to lessen. It is like someone taking the large boulder off of you that you are buried under. It is a pressure release AND a muscle relaxer that when it hits you also breaks the bondage of tight, closing-in, surrounding stress that your muscles feel after laying down for so long in a postition that is not favorable to my pain relief. That is ANY position I lay in my bed with by the way.
I enjoy the morning silence in the backyard as I start to feel that I can become mobile without too much pain. It has now been 30-45 minutes since I ate my cookie. I do not feel it yet in my system. I DO feel the power of the candy which is a smaller dose than the cookies and smaller by a lot. The candy is about 20% THC and .70 % CBD (CBD is always lower in THC hybrids, it is higher when they are called CBD hybrids for the CBD plant is the main producer for that one over the THC strained one) I am starting to feel like I want to get my day started.
Did I just do that?
7 a.m. –Â I go inside to make sure the day has started right for my family and check on the wife and see if there is a time on the calander for my son to be at work. I prep the dishes for the dishwasher and then head to the bedroom for the morning talks with my beautiful wife. As she gets ready for work, I lay out my intentions with her for the day. I get reminded that just because I am feeling better right now does not mean I can fulfill my list of tasks I set out for me. I have a VERY bad tendency to over work myself around the house because when I have medical marijuana, I don’t have the muscle tightness that locks onto the bone structure of my skeleton. This has made me eager to get started (before it wears off) on my day. I tell her I will TRY to not overdo it but the usual course of the day is that I will and she knows it too.
8 a.m. – I see my soulmate head off to work and I wave goodbye with a kiss in the wind to go with it. THEN, I decide on the weather. This makes a big difference in me and how my day will go. The worse the weather is (such as heavy humidity in the summer or in a thunderstorm about to come in the area being the worst of the worst) Since today is a good day so far, it is 65 degrees out at 8.a.m., it means it could be a hot one. I can handle heat if it does not come with humidity. I lived in Arizona for 15+ years without too much troubles. In the monsoon season though, I could barely move without medical marijuana. I bring my mini TV tray out on my porch with my laptop, phone, and a mess of wires for them both to plug in. That takes me a little while to do with my conditions. Overall, to get everything out there, from drinks (coffee -iced that is, and a 32 oz powerade bottle now used as a refillable water bottle for me. I have literally 10 bottles of water at ALL TIMES in the fridge), to a snack, headphones if I am using them too. I arrange my two side tables to match my chair and computer location for the day.
9 a.m. – I am ready to face the day! My medical marijuana cookie has settled inside my stomach and I feel it throughout my body. It has made my muscles that were locked up relax. I am not anxious or stressed. I now feel like I am a “normal” person again.
So far… So Good…
9:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon – I am working on stuff inside my computer although I do get up several times to walk around before my back locks up from sitting. If that happens, it triggers my fibromyalgia and then the nerves inside me fire up in odd places. Places such as the top side of my left shoulder and the worst ones of making my hips numb and screaming in pain at the same time. The hips get so bad that I cannot sit OR stand. I cannot walk it off. It will not leave me. Muscle relaxers do not help. Once I start to feel even a hint of pain coming from the lower back and hip areas I immediately take a pull off of the metered dose vaporizer. Once I do that I shift what I am doing. After all, since it is now noonish, maybe I should eat breakfast already.
I grab something light to eat. The first meal of the day for me is always the worst. If I have not tamed my pain by now, I am too nauseated to eat. I have to go smoke a bowl of my medical marijuana to settle my stomach so I can keep the food down. After a bite, I see I am nauseated and smoke that bowl. I then eat the rest of breakfast and pull out some frozen chicken for dinner.
1;30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. – I am now back outside on my porch finishing whatever project I came across for the day. It is usually writing a report for some place or researching FOR a report. During this little window the sun creeps over my roof and into my lap. I have to relocate if I want to continue. The sun is instantly too hot for my legs, for the black computer and for the chargers sitting in the sunlight. I then move to the backyard to sit in the new shade that is coming over the house to the back. I set up the back like I did the front on my back table and take a break for a few.
It Is Getting Late.. Already?
3:00 p.m. – I am typing away and my alarm goes off. It is 3:00 p.m.. It is time to check on my nieces nearby. I make sure things are good through some texts and drink something while I sit inside on my comfortable brown recliner. I get instantly tired. I do not realize that even the little activity has worn me out due to the fact that my degenerative arthritis of the spine and hips has worn on my endurance. I have pushed myself to keep going and now I am tired. I sometimes fall asleep when I don’t want to sitting in that chair and again today, YEP, it got me. I closed my eyes for a split second (I SWEAR that is all it was) and then I open them (lol I got woken up) to see my beautiful wife shaking my feet on the recliner saying “Hi there”! I am usually lost when I wake up to her in the afternoon because she is not home when I went to sleep. I think for a minute if I am dreaming my day or not and she woke me at night (the night before) but it is real and I collect my thoughts as I look at the time it is NOW.
5:10 p.m. – The time is 5:10 p.m. already. How did it get so late? I did not eat another cookie (yet) nor smoke too much to make me sleepy. I don’t use strains that make me tired during the day anyway (strains high in THC and low in CBD are more stimulating to the nervous system than one high in CBD and low in THC which makes you VERY sleepy). I use the sleepy strains to sleep. And BOY! DO I SLEEP LIKE A BABY!! I am knocked out using a strain for sleeping. No pills needed! But, I am now sore from being in one position for over an hour (that is painful awake or sleeping to me) and use my vaporizer and eat a medicated cookie.
Dinner Is Ready With Medical Marijuana
6:30 p.m. – It is about now that my conditions “allow” me to start feeling like eating. No, I didn’t say I was hungry. In fact, I am
nauseated at this time. The daily “grind” of viewing a computer screen, the tasks of moving outside for fresh air and a “different view” compared to the same four walled view inside. It can make one feel isolated when they have chronic pain. That is very bad. It leads to depression and then to deep or severe depression if exposed to this for a long period or periods of time. The change
of scenery does wonders for the anxiety of oncoming rising pain levels that grow over the course of the day. I mix up my scenery by taking it inside and then again to the backyard and then again to a different side of the yard to get a different feeling of the yard (such as better wind area compared to next to the house.) I go in the backyard and take a dose off of my vaporizer or two and let it kick in. It will take no longer than 10 minutes to feel the full effects of that dose.
6:45-7:00 p.m. I have dinner with the family. They will usually wait for me to eat with them knowing how my body reacts to the doses and how fast they work on me. If I am having a really bad day, I tell them to eat without me but when I have medical marijuana over opiates, I can eat with them.
8 p.m. – After eating and cleaning up we decide what we will do for the night. We will choose to watch TV, maybe a movie together, (I can sit through a movie once I have medical marijuana in my system) or play a game together. On this night, we choose to watch a movie together called “Why Him?” It was very funny and we enjoyed it.
The Day is Finally Over
10:00 p.m. – 10:30 p.m. – The movie is over and it is time to settle into the bedroom for the night. I go outside one last time to smoke a bowl of flowered budded medical marijuana. It hits me quickly and lets me relax to go to sleep. I make sure that this strain now is high in CBD so that my muscles will not lock up on me during the night. If I don’t have it, my muscles do tend to lock up and wake me violently with severe pain as noted in the earlier diary entry (part 1).
11:00 p.m. – 11:30 p.m. – I drift off to sleep next to my beautiful wife, We have the TV in the bedroom on a sleep timer for 30 minutes but I never heard the TV go off as I was comfortable enough to drift off to sleep. I wake once in the night to go to the bathroom but outside of that,I am able to sleep restfully tonight.
This has been another diary entry for you to visualize. This an accurate 100% true diary entry of mine. This was my day that I had when I wrote this originally. I put it here for those that do not know what it is like to be in this type of situation so that others can relate to what we go through on a daily basis. Please do not disregard the feelings of someone that has chronic pain. You will never know when it is that you have made a difference just by acknowledging a person for their pain. Many are afraid to talk about it but if you allow someone to tell you, don’t mock their pain. Walk a mile in their shoes before you begin to be critical of what they are telling you on how they feel. No one can say they know how another feels until they have lived in their situation. Let’s not be judgemental just because we may not understand what they are going through. Remember, Life is “Do as you would have done to you” not “Do to others before they do it to you”
Mike Fogarty
