Ancient teachings

I know that some of you weary of my drug experiences, but I would ask for your compassion as I travel the dark road of pain upon which guides are few. For now, the marijuana is taking me more deeply within, and although it is a frightening journey, it is the only way that I know to proceed. Daily pain that lasts for years and leaves one increasingly disabled is not a shallow experience, and it requires all the depth and courage that I possess to live a rewarding life in its presence. Sometimes, every new day feels like a new failure, partly because I know that there are those who are doing ten times better despite being in twenty times more pain. I can’t even tell that I am growing. I used to know who I was; now I have lost my life, and I don’t know where to look for it.

The worst fears come when I go to bed. They are many, but Peggy’s death is the greatest with my own death being second. The fear would be there anyway, but since my nightmarish trip on marijuana, the drug has consistently taken me to the edge of panic. Yet, I continue to use it because I must look into the pit. Pain and terror are within, death is at my heels, and there is no place to run.

Yesterday, I came home from my daily bike ride to the library with books on aging by Ram Dass and Jimmy Carter. These men are religious (Carter is a Southern Baptist, and Dass defies labeling), but they write from the heart rather than the pulpit. This absence of dogma enables me, an atheist, to hear them, and to find common ground with them. It is a very good feeling. Last night, I started with Dass.

Ram Dass had a stroke in 1997 when he was just a little older than I, and he still needs 24 hour a day care. When a man like that talks about pain and fear and death, I listen. As I read him last night, peace settled over me. When I was ready for sleep, I both ate marijuana butter and smoked marijuana, and it was very good. This morning, I found the courage for hashish, which can be thought of as a concentrated form of marijuana. After I smoked it, I put on some harp music, and Peggy massaged my shoulders, as she does every morning. My mind raced, but the fear did not return.

Increasingly since the bad marijuana experience, I see death everywhere and in everyone, the young as much as the old. Like Buddhist monks who meditate upon impermanence as they sit beside decaying corpses, so has my life become a meditation upon death. “I surrender,” I said to death last night. “From now on, I will do all that is within my power to embrace you.” For guides, I, like Dass, must turn to other cultures because my own society is but a shallow wasteland.

I’ve been helping Peggy with some research she has undertaken about ancient Greek and Roman mythology. I had no idea how many gods they had, and I was even more surprised to find that so many of these gods speak to my experience, or at least to what I would like to be my experience. For example, Thanatos was a gentle and benevolent god who ruled over non-violent death, but his sisters, the Keres, were fanged, screeching, taloned women who wore bloody garments, and reveled in violence. Their power was such that even Zeus could not restrain them. Acheron, the lord of pain, was also a benevolent spirit. He had been transformed into one of five rivers of the underworld, and was considered an agent of healing rather than punishment. Old age was Geras (the Romans called him Senectus), a malevolent spirit who was portrayed as a shriveled old man. Homer described him as standing: “…someday at the side of every man, deadly, wearying, dreaded even by the gods.” I see my own life in such descriptions, and their timelessness comforts me.

I’ve watched ten or twenty people die, and I’ve helped prepare scores, at least, of others for burial. I was fourteen when I saw my first human death; seven when I watched my first dog die; and eight when I first killed a living creature (oh, how I regret shooting that little mockingbird). For some reason, I remember individual corpses better than I remember individual deaths. There were the newlyweds who tried to clean their gas oven with gasoline. As I stood over their black and swollen bodies, my heart was as heavy as if I had known them. They didn’t deserve to die for trying to clean their oven. Then there was the carpenter who had a heart attack. As I removed his striped overalls and untied the shoes that he himself had laced, my eyes were repeatedly drawn to his face. We would have been such good friends, I thought. He was gone, yet I could almost imagine that he was there beside me. I still imagine that he is beside me. So many dead bodies! People who I kept looking and smelling more or less alive so that their mourners wouldn’t be reminded of the putrefaction of the grave. The more I worked in funeral homes, the more I came to regard the American handling of death as a sickness.

I am horrified to think that I too will rot (I want to be burned, but that’s just an accelerated form of rotting). Yet, the worst thing that I can imagine would be the very thing that my mother wanted, which was to be buried in a concrete vault so that her remains would be prevented from nourishing other lives... When I picture myself as a corpse, I worry that I will have died with my eyes open, and that no one will close them. Being dirt doesn’t frighten me; it’s the getting there that’s the problem. Yet, I will rot, and so there is nothing to do but to embrace death. After all, I will be dead infinitely longer than I will have been alive.

Things just keep getting stranger and stranger

Russell—my habitually jobless brother-in-law—lived by the motto: “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.” If Russell was out of marijuana, he would drive as far as it took and spend as much as necessary to get some, and he would smoke it all day everyday until he ran out. Then he divorced my sister, married a woman with three children who vehemently opposed drugs, and took a sixty-hour job at an egg factory (picture a filthy, smelly, ear-shattering, disease ridden, standing-room-only hell for a million defenseless creatures, and that’s an egg factory). Go figure.

I never wanted to smoke dope all day long, but I’ve been high to some extent for weeks now, and I can’t say that I oppose staying that way. Pot lessens my pain, lightens my mood, helps me sleep, decreases my stress, renews my sense of wonder, heightens my appreciation of music, helps me get along better with Peggy, makes me tolerant of—and interested in—other people, and enables me to be more honest yet more tactful. On the downside, it shreds my memory, makes me accident-prone, messes with my coordination, decreases my ability to judge time and speed, and probably has long-term consequences that I don’t even know about. This leads me to ask which are more important to me, the good things that pot gives or the good things that pot takes away. Right now, my vote is with number one. Sometimes, you don’t know how bad things have been until they get a little better, and pot has made things a great deal better. Fuck having brains; I just want to feel good.

As I see it, pot is different from narcotics, anti-depressants, and sleeping pills (all of which I’ve relied on heavily at one time or another) primarily in that it does a better job with less risk. I’ve taken a lot of powerful drugs, but they all scared me so much that I never had the balls to take as many as I actually needed, and my fear increased dramatically as I built up a tolerance to every one of them. One virtue of pot is that you’re not going to wake up with yellow eyes or failed kidneys, and I would sacrifice quite a few brains cells to avoid either of those. Brains are good, obviously, but you have to ask yourself after a certain point how many are strictly necessary. Of course, I’m assuming here that marijuana-related memory loss is long-term, and I don’t know that to be true… Now what was I saying?

The photo is of a psychedelic frogfish and was made by David Hall at seaphotos.com

My continuing adventures with medical marijuana

I started out smoking my pot with a homemade pipe, but I hated that pipe, so I got a store bought one, but I hated it too. I then bought a bong, and it’s far superior to the pipes, but I would prefer to not smoke anything, so last week, I threw two cups of marijuana leaves into a pint of olive oil, and heated the oil at 220° F (104° C) for two hours. The result was neither pretty nor tasty, yet palatable enough on toast. The only real downside to the mixture is that it takes so long to work (up to three hours). I’ve also had a problem getting the dosage right. One night I wouldn’t feel anything after swallowing a rounded teaspoon; the next night, a heaping teaspoonful would practically leave me catatonic. Because I’m trying to make my marijuana experimentation as pleasant as possible to Peggy, the catatonic nights posed some behavioral challenges. When you can barely walk or talk, just saying goodnight is difficult, yet I consider it important that I be able to function more or less normally when I’m high, so the challenge isn’t altogether unwelcome.

Yesterday, I decided to take a new tack, so I bought a bottle of 190 proof alcohol, and mixed it with nearly a quart of marijuana leaves (see photo). Now, I just have to shake the mixture twice a day, and in two weeks, the THC will have leached out of the pot and into the alcohol, at which time the foul smelling and horrible tasting concoction can either be taken with an eyedropper or rubbed into the skin. I will admit to no little curiosity about this combination of two intoxicants, which is infamous for landing people in the ER. Now, going to the ER when you’re having a bad time of it on pot isn’t the best idea in the world because—unless you’re psychotic anyway or your marijuana is impure—your only real danger comes from panic. So, you ask, how does that work, exactly? Well, think of marijuana as being like water in a lake. If you’re learning to swim, and you panic in the water, bad things happen unnecessarily, and so it is with marijuana, although with the latter, the bad things are all inside your head, and should go away after several hours if you are able to remain calm.

Before I close, I’ll report on my physical therapy appointment yesterday. The night before, I was in so much pain from my exercises that I needed marijuana, Requip, Neurontin, and oxycodone to sleep even a little, so I decided to ask the therapist if it made sense for me to keep exercising since, no matter how little I do or how much time I take off, the pain is still intolerable. I never got to ask because he told me straight away to stop exercising for a month, at which time he would like to see me again. As he pointed out, I’m already up to 80% flexibility in the shoulder that I had surgery on in April, and so it would be reasonable for me to give up the exercises for good.

While I’m reporting, I’ll add that I saw my surgeon last week. He said he was unhappy about having done three surgeries on me only to have each of them leave me in even worse pain. I try to stay upbeat around doctors to keep them from becoming discouraged, and so I did what I could to cheer Mark up, but I went away feeling badly about the appointment because I’m afraid he’s going to balk about doing a fourth—and hopefully final—surgery. Before you remind me that it’s the job of the doctor to comfort the patient instead of the other way around, I’ll just mention that what should be the case and what is the case are often miles apart. If you have a doctor whom you like as much as I like Mark, it pays to make your time with him something that he will feel good about because frustrated doctors tend to dump patients, even when, as in my case, a negative outcome is almost surely unrelated to any mistake the doctor made or could have foreseen.

I just realized that I’ve gained eight followers since I started writing about marijuana. Are some of them narcs, politicians, or talk show employees who will soon take my words out of context and feature me as an example of why Oregon’s medical marijuana law should be overturned? I’m torn between wanting to be as honest about this subject as I’ve been about other subjects, and not wanting to harm the future of medical marijuana, or get myself arrested, or make myself into an object of public ridicule. Maybe the mass of conservatives really are well-meaning people of conscience, but all I see in their leadership is greed, bigotry, dishonesty, and the willingness to destroy any and everyone who gets in their way; all in the name of their “Blessed Savior.” Oh, but I forgot; it’s our supposedly liberal president who reversed his campaign promises when he ordered the latest war on medical marijuana. Are no politicians to be trusted, ever? No, no politicians, ever. No politicians, no government agencies, no military spokesmen, and no religious leaders. Power does indeed corrupt, if not always, nearly always.

Getting my marijuana card

Getting my marijuana card and my first batch of legal pot (legal under Oregon law—it’s still a federal crime) took two weeks and a day. Utterly ignorant of the process, I started with a Google search, and then made a few phone calls. I learned that any doctor could write a recommendation (you can’t get an actual prescription), so I took a chance on my internist even after his nurse told me that he wouldn’t do it. Of course, she was right, but I wanted to argue it out with him and at least hear his reasoning. He said that he was so supportive of medical marijuana that he had helped start one of the local clinics, and that I was a shoe-in for a card, but that his insurance wouldn’t allow him to recommend one. So, I had to pay $255 for the clinic’s hippie/earth-mother M.D. to sign the recommendation, and then I had to mail another $100 to the state of Oregon for the actual card.

After I was approved at the clinic, I put my name and phone number on their bulletin board as that of someone who was looking for a grower. Three men called in one day, and two of those came to my house bearing samples. The first was a disabled man who was driven by his wife in their BMW. He said he was 63, and disliked getting high, but needed marijuana to control his spasms. He left me a couple of ounces in buds and upper leaves to sample, and said I would need six plants a year in order to have enough to smoke, eat, vaporize, and make into tinctures. As for money, he wouldn’t take any—now or ever.

The second grower was in his twenties and came with his girlfriend, both of whom wore dreadlocks. I wondered if they felt odd talking about marijuana to an old and straight-looking guy like me. For my part, I just found their dreadlocks quaint, in a homely sort of way—like Birkenstocks and tie-dye. We had a long pleasant chat, and the woman left me with a single bud. Like the first man, they wouldn’t take any money. I’ve opted to go with the first grower (I can only have one legally-designated grower) because of his intial generosity, his reputation, and because his living circumstances are stable.

As soon as my guests left, I tore off like a shot on my bike to a downtown headshop to buy a pipe or vaporizer. I was the oldest person there by far, but the all-male staff and customers were almost protectively friendly (young men invariably treat me well). What I came up with for a temporary solution was a cheap little pipe that soon proved worthless. While looking for matches, I found an old pipe made of plumbing parts that I didn’t even know I had, so I used it—I immediately hated that pipe, so Peggy and I spent part of her sixtieth birthday bong-shopping (see photo).

My new grower—Stephan—suggested that I start out smoking the leaves since the bud might be too kickass. When you’re as susceptible to the power of marijuana as I am, you take such suggestions seriously, so I smoked a bowl of leaves, and then watched in fascination as the high kept getting more intense for over an hour. When a high becomes uncomfortable, one thing that usually helps is to go for a walk, so I took my blind cowdog, and started out. Wouldn’t you know it, I ran into person after person with whom I felt obliged to talk, but I didn't know any of them well enough to say, “Hi, neighbor, I’m stoned out of my gourd on my first sample of medical marijuana.”

When you’re in that kind of situation, you have no idea whether people can tell that you’re temporarily insane (paranoia being natural when you suspect that someone suspects you’re crazy). However, the more a person who is high listens to people who are straight, the more sure he becomes that they aren’t any too sane either. But then there are other—presumably straight—people with whom you connect strongly, and you know that they’re either oblivious to your mental state, or else they like it. One such person is a neighbor whom I’ve known for twenty years during which I thought of her as gloomy, unfriendly, fault-finding, and an all-around unpleasant person. Then yesterday, we had a long and delightful conversation. Today was the same way. I said hi to a man with whom I’ve never exchanged more than ten words, and he couldn’t stop talking, very pleasantly to be sure, yet with many times more openness and friendliness than I would have expected. I’ve always HATED being around most people when I was stoned, but with a few more interactions like those, I could change my mind.

Last night was the big test, pain-wise, so, having maintained a semblance of sanity with the leaf, I smoked a bowl of bud at bedtime (Peggy even let me smoke it in her bed). Despite being very high, I went to sleep easily while watching movies inside my head, and everytime I woke up during the night, I took another hit. It was one of the first nights in years that I didn’t take a single narcotic or sleeping pill, and I didn’t even use ice. I should have gotten some ice after about seven hours in bed, but the longer I lay there, the more hellbent I became on making it through just one night without having to freeze my shoulder off.

I’m like a kid with a new toy. What a difference legal marijuana makes for someone like myself who remembers a time when people were sentenced to twenty years to life for the possession of a single joint that was 20 times less potent than the pot I’m smoking!

Update. I wrote the above a few days ago, and my appreciation of these new strains of super pot has increased to the point that I think of the drug more as a guide than a chemical. One of the first things that Kush (my favorite strain) taught me was how constricted these years of pain have left my entire body. It did this by first relaxing me into jelly, and then drawing my muscles up into the rigor mortis-like state that I hold them everyday. I was shocked to the point of wondering how I have survived all that I’ve been through even as well as I have. With help from the marijuana, I immediately started training my body to relax, and when I saw my physical therapist today, he was surprised by how loose I’ve become.

Stephan just brought me some more bud. After so many years of pain, I can scarcely believe that something even might be helping. Check with me in a couple of weeks, and I’ll probably tell you that I was mistaken.

Update

I am now living a life in which I am desperate for sleep. I don’t know why I’m in such pain, but since I felt similarly after my previous surgeries, only to eventually reach the point where I could sleep for up to four hours at a time, I can but hope that this time will be that way also. After all, I only had my third surgery nine weeks ago today.

Before my final awakening this morning, I dreamed that I flew bodily to the home of my friends—long since dead—Jim and Doris Bateman. I was so happy to have surrogate grandparents whom I could drop in on at any time that I cried, partly out of gratitude and partly because I couldn’t allow myself to believe that I was really welcome. When I awoke, I was desperate (it seems that I’m desperate about everything anymore) to have such people in my life again. I then realized that I do, really. I have Bella, and I also have a couple of elderly neighors who would love to have me visit. It’s not the same though now that I’m 62. Sadly, the time for grandparents is past.

I’m taking fewer narcotics because they don’t work well enough (outside of elevating my mood) to risk liver damage. Double doses of sleeping pills still deaden the pain enough for me to at least rest a little, although I worry far more about becoming dependent upon them than I ever worried about Demerol or Dilaudid. I’m still pursuing marijuana, and, because of my desperation, I have placed what is surely an inordinate amount of hope in it. Meanwhile, Obama just reversed his promise to not bust medical marijuana users, doctors, growers, and everyone else affiliated with the drug. Because Peggy is a nurse, I worry that she might lose her license simply by being married to me—sort of a collateral damage scenario. The waste, bigotry, and short-sightedness that is America leaves me aghast. I violate my conscience everytime I pay taxes. I mustn’t dwell on that though…. I see that the mailman just delivered my seventh medical bill of the week.

When I go to a doctor, I take along a summary of my problems so that I can express myself succinctly and not forget anything. The rest of this post consists of my summary from last week.

Treatments that have been of little or no benefit in relieving my bilateral shoulder pain:

Three shoulder surgeries in two years
Numerous steroid shots
Several courses of physical therapy
Dalmane, Restoril, Ambien, Lunesta, Hydrocodone, Oxycodone, Ultram, Demerol, Dilaudid, Naproxen, Piroxicam, Celebrex, Neurontin, Elavil, Tofranil, DMSO, Ginger, Turmeric, SAM-e, Habanero Peppers, Topical Anesthetics
Ice packs
Massage, Yoga, Acupuncture
Sleeping in a recliner

It is a good night when I am able to sleep two hours in a row before the pain awakens me, at which time I have to take more pills, get a fresh ice pack, or stay up for awhile. The pain makes it necessary for me to sleep entirely on my back, but my middle back hurts so much in that position that it combines with the shoulder pain to keep me awake.

Before the onset of shoulder pain, I enjoyed yardwork and handyman projects; but I have to be very cautious about such things lest the nighttime pain becomes so bad that I am challenged to sleep at all. I also enjoyed camping, but the pain now prevents me from doing that as well. Life as I had lived it for decades ended in 2006.

I’ve spent 4 ½ months out of the past two years in a sling, and 4 ½ additional months during which I couldn’t lift anything heavier than a cup of coffee. Now, I’m facing at least one more surgery. As with other treatments, I will submit to it simply because I am desperate for relief and don’t know what else to do.

Other complaints:

Burning pains in both shins was diagnosed by one doctor as complex regional pain syndrome and by another as syringomyelia. A third doctor disagreed with both diagnoses but didn’t have one of her own.

Raynaud’s Disease in both hands.

Advanced osteoarthritis in my left knee accompanied by a Baker’s Cyst and chondromalacia (a 2006 knee debridement failed to help).

An osteonecrotic C-5 vertebra that was initially thought to contribute to my shoulder pain, although a vertebral biopsy and a series of steroid shots to my neck failed to reduce the pain.

Sleep apnea for which I use a CPAP.

*Photo by O'Dea