What symptoms do you have that are relieved with medical marijuana?
I have bone tumours all throughout my body. If you can see, they grow outwardly from the long bone, outwardly into the muscles and the veins, stretching the muscles and the veins making it very painful. More importantly, any kind of movement could tear a muscle or tear a vein from that tumour. And if you tear a vein, a clot could break off and go to your heart, your brain, your lungs and it could kill you. So the idea is to keep everything relaxed. Plus there is a sac of fluid over each tumour called a bursar. That bursar is trying to prevent the muscles and the veins from tearing. The more that's inflamed, the higher rate of malignancy it has. So the idea is to keep it less inflamed. Cannabis serves as an anti-inflammatory. Then my right ankle, the tibia and fibula is fused by a big tumour—it's twenty-four hour pain, there is nothing they can do with it. So imagine that pain being a brick. Take that brick, throw it against cement, it's going to break up into ten different pieces. Each piece is smaller, the size of a tenth, but it's still an original piece of that brick, but it's not as intense, therefore it doesn't hurt as much. So the pain is spread out - cannabis does that. Now, my two disorders say that I should develop tumours at any time and my existing ones can grow at any time. That's basically a walking death sentence. Well, I haven't had a tumour grow, or an existing or new one develop, in thirty-two years. Why? Because the disease says I should. I think it's the cannabis. So for me it serves all these purposes and I get no euphoric effect from it; I never have. I have two elements. The first was diagnosed at age ten, which is multiple congenital cartilaginous exostoses, which means bone tumours on the ends of long bones. Whatever tumours you have at puberty will grow; you'll develop no new ones. Once you stop growing, once your growth centres are closed, if you've survived, then there's a good chance you can live a normal life—a fairly normal life. This happened, at age nineteen I started developing new tumours and the existing ones started growing. It wasn't until three years later that we finally found a diagnosis called a variant of a syndrome called pseudo-pseudo-hypo parathyroidism, prevalent in people with multiple congenital cartilaginous exostoses can grow tumours at any time—new tumours—and existing ones can grow at any time. So at that point, when I was told that diagnosis, the doctor said I just read you a death sentence; a potential death sentence. And I said, Doctor that's the second time in my life someone's done that. I said at least now I know what I have. So the tumours haven't grown. They stopped growing when I was twenty-three and that's really when I started using cannabis. I could get a lot then and so I really used a lot and the tumours haven't grown since. So I truly believe that cannabis serves as a tumour retardant even for bone.
