This article was originally published on the Marijuana Patients Organization site on December 15, 2013.
I’m a BKA — lost my lower left leg in an accident in 2003…they operated 13 times in the next 3 years trying to save it, but in the end…. I also developed what is known to us amputees as a ganglia… when they snap the nerves back into your stump, sometimes the nerve endings grow together in a wad…it is incredibly painful. Shocks begin from nowhere and continue like a cattle prod being touched to your leg every 60 – 90 seconds and can last for days… I accepted this a part of the price to walk. Doctors plied me with oxycotin and oxycodone, lorcet, Demerol, hydrocodone, gabapentin, morphine sulfate pills and there were even times I’d have to be admitted to the ER for injected morphine………all of those “FDA legally approved” drugs made it impossible to take care of my daughter — at the time I was a single Dad (got remarried in 2008) — it made it risky to work, I was lethargic and confused most of the time and I was close to getting addicted to the stuff. Now, I smoke pot. I have hardly any of the episodic pain and am able to make it through the entire work day with minimal pain and sleep at night… blessed sleep. However, I live in a state that supports tobacco and alcohol, but hates the demon weed…so, I can be a legal addict and a danger to my community, but I cannot get rid of the pain unless I break the law. As soon as I am able I will be moving, but for the time being I have to remain a criminal so my daughter can finish her senior year…
Here’s how it started…….one Sunday afternoon I was watching a football game with an old friend who has cancer….he lit up a joint and offered me a hit, said it was keeping him alive by making him hungry. He told me one of the worst things about cancer is that you don’t want to eat and when you do it comes right back up so they waste away — I hadn’t smoke pot since college and I was about 57 at the time — anyway, I declined. But let me tell you, the pot today is way more potent than the stuff we smoked in college 40 years ago… I lived just down the street from him and when I walked in my house I went straight to the ice box and was standing there with the door open, looking, when my wife walked up and looked at me — you looked stoned, she said….and I realized I was and I had the munchies —– AND I had forgotten about my leg.
I don’t know if the pot works on the pain or it just makes it so you don’t care about the pain, but it does something and it is wonderful. And with the stuff available in legal states, you can get some that takes care of the pain but doesn’t give you that ‘stoned’ goofy feeling I remember. best pain med ever.