Month: September 2019

THC and CBD: My Personal Experience.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 8 Comments

So, I’ve had chronic pain for decades, at least since the early 1990s. I use acetaminophen regularly, sometimes resorting to T3s and even hydromorphone (oral morphine) on occasions where the pain and discomfort were (are) extreme. I can’t take ibuprofen because I have only one kidney (my left one was removed because of cancer in 2002) although it works the best for me. The other day, as a tribute to our silliness, Carolyn and I went canoeing on Buttle Lake in Strathcona Park. Such a beautiful place, but the wind can come up very strongly. We knew it could do that, but we blithely went out in the canoe anyway, and surely enough we got caught in a very snotty windstorm. We had to paddle at ramming speed for quite a while. My 72 year old body protested on every stroke. A couple of days later things came to a head and I had excruciating pain in my back because of a severe muscle strain (probably a tear, but who’s quibbling). So now I had acute pain competing with my chronic pain for attention. Both were winning at this stage. Enter CBD and THC.

There are lots of websites extolling the virtues of CBD and THC for the treatment of chronic pain, arthritis included. Here is one example from Medical News Today. WebMD is what I judge to be a fairly reliable source of internet-based medical information. Like this article in WebMD argues, consulting a physician is always important before using CBD as a medicine.

Great, so in the interests of attempting to alleviate some of my chronic pain, and being desperate, I decided to try using CBD and THC. To that end I had an MD ( a locum in my medical clinic) refer me to a group of health care professionals (physicians, nurses and therapists) at a clinic not far from my home. I figured I’d be a test subject although I know very well that a one person study is not a study at all. I was called shortly thereafter to a consultation with a physician who has experience with using CBD and THC medicinally. I was prescribed the use of CBD daily for chronic pain and THC at night to help me sleep through the night. On the physician’s recommendation I bought a 40 MG vial of CBD and a 40 MG vial of THC from what they said was a reputable manufacturer. So far, I’ve found that the manufacturer has been very careful to sell me only what I have a prescription for. The physician I saw prepared for me a sheet of instructions for taking CBD and THC. Since then, I’ve had regular calls from the clinic inquiring as to my experience with the products. I completed my first course of using CBD and THC a while back and have recently picked up my second prescription.

I really hoped that CBD and THC would work for me. T3s are fine, but harsh on the stomach. The THC is fine. It gets me stoned to some extent so I tried to take it only at nighttime. Doing what I do in my daily life, I can’t be stoned all the time. I need a clear(ish) head. I have enough trouble with brain fog as it is because of my immune disease. I don’t want to add to it with meds that don’t work all that well. I don’t think CBD worked for me at all, ever. I kept giving it a shot paying very close attention to my symptoms but I felt no improvement.

After I injured myself canoeing, I saw an MD again. I still had a few T3s left so I wasn’t too concerned. Well, the T3s ran out really fast. At one point when my pain was pushing 9.5 out of 10, I took T3s, up to 4 at a time and washed that down with a ml of CBD and another of THC. I also had some alcohol to really wash it down. I was then able to sleep, but I couldn’t keep that insanity up for long. So, back to the my regular medical clinic for some more T3s.

I also went back to the other clinic, the one that prescribed the CBD and THC for me. I had a consultation with an MD there and we basically agreed that CBD was not going to work for me. Clearly, it doesn’t work for everybody. I may still try using THC, but only at bedtime, and only if I’m feeling I need it for putting me to sleep. I may cease taking it altogether.

I’m quite sad about this because I had high expectations. At the moment all I can do to keep my pain levels down is to do very little of anything. Obviously I can write, but walking is even difficult and going out to socialize is increasingly unpleasant. Damn it, I love to socialize! I still go out and do volunteer work and maybe go to a restaurant now and again, but I have to rest frequently.

I knew that CBD and THC had not been tested using double-blind studies, but I hoped they would work anyway. Unfortunately for me, that wasn’t (and isn’t) the case. I sincerely hope they work for you.

On the ferry with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

[I wrote this piece of writing a few months ago to submit to a CBC writing contest. I just learned that I wasn’t even shortlisted for the prize. That’s fine, but I still think it’s worth reading so I’m giving you a shot at it here. If you like it please share it.]

On the ferry on our way to Vancouver.  It’s an overcast day and the water is slightly choppy as the ferry glides towards its destination. My wife and I have seats on the starboard side. I sit by the window. Looking forward along the ship down the Salish Sea the sky and sea melt into a continuous light grey with swaths of steely blue. I can’t tell where the horizon is, where the water touches the sky. Gabriola Island is off in a distant westerly mist. We’re passing close to tiny Entrance Island with its lighthouse and scattered red-roofed buildings. The history of its many keepers is replete with impropriety and the occasional drownings. There’s a ten metre sloop under full sail between us and Entrance island. An older woman sitting behind us turns to her husband and asks him: “Is that boat anchored out there?” 

Fittingly, I’m reading Kurt Vonnegut Jr. His posthumously published notes and speeches, introduced by his son, Mark, are called Armageddon in Retrospect(2008, Berkeley Books). Anyone who reads Vonnegut’s books, especially Galapagos knows how apt this title is.  To Vonnegut the world is funny, tragic, and ridiculous. “Look at this planet…look at us go!”  People, their silly, impossible ideas, their botched projects, and their often short and brutish lives are grist for his mill. He lovingly dissects human idiosyncratic frailties, but death, death always has a place of honour in his narrative and so does war, that insane theatre where heroes are supposed to be made and so on.

On this trip, the ship is packed with people but not completely loaded with cars. The high ferry rates are most likely pushing many people to leave their cars at home and walk down the long corridors and up the foot passenger loading ramp at the terminal dragging luggage and sometimes kids behind them.

I couldn’t have a better traveling companion than Kurt Vonnegut Junior, except for my wife of course. He’ll help me come to grips with our collective denial to see the world as it is, our self-righteous ignorance, our misuse of language, our multiple genetic weaknesses, organic diseases, and absurdities like our stupid wars. As Vonnegut says, “We are impossibly conceited animals and actually dumb as heck…Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.”[1]If only people on this boat could see that they are all closet schizophrenics, there would be peace on earth. Too bad, but we’re actually dumb as heck!  Now, how many people would actually recognize that in themselves? 

In my former career I researched death, wrote and lectured about it, all uplifting stuff. I was not like Kübler-Ross with her focus on dying and good grief. Rather, my interest was all about how we collectively try to deny death using cultural institutions like hospitals. Of course, I feel some affinity toward my fellow passengers. In a sense, we’re all in this together. We’re all dying. Some of us don’t like that idea at all. Actually, we haven’t liked that idea for millennia, so we (humanity, that is) concocted some quite elaborate immortality projects[2], giving their adherents the delusional sense that they might live forever. Silly them. Of course, we die, and we’re a lot like mushrooms in that way. I realized years ago during a walk in the woods that humans are a lot like mushrooms. Mushrooms emerge from the hyphae of fungi that are concealed in the soil, spend a glorious few days flowering and spreading spores, then shrivel and die almost as quickly as they came into being. People are like that. Generation after generation we emerge from an underlying social structure of selfish genes, fruit into adulthood, spread a few spores if we’re lucky, then fade to slimy black in short order. Clearly, mushrooms, people, death, and Vonnegut go together swimmingly. So, what about my mushroom-like traveling companions? I did say we all die, didn’t I?

Aside from the poor unfortunates who will die suddenly of drug overdoses, car crashes, or suicide, I’m sure most of my fellow travelers will end up on their death beds surprised as hell at what’s happening to them because who knew death is for real? My mother wasn’t surprised when she died last winter. She had no idea what was happening to her. She couldn’t possibly be surprised. Life was nothing to her. Death was nothing to her. She had profound dementia and nurses pumping a steady stream of morphine into her veins. She was ninety-four years old. Fade to black. So it goes.

On this ferry, the old Queen of Cowichan, I’m captive on a floating maelstrom of silly humans, regular humans and exotic humans. There are babies, old codgers like me (one sitting in the seats behind us forlornly packing an oxygen bottle), the inevitable groups of young girls scantily dressed even in this coldish weather their sexuality bursting at the seams. They giggle and jostle each other as they push their way through the annoyed crowd waiting in the cafeteria line. There’s a mama pushing a stroller, and a few young men driven unconsciously by floods of testosterone looking sullen and as menacing as possible. So cute!

What can I say, I’m an inveterate people watcher, and I’ve got a lot to see on this old tub of a ferry.  The denizen aboard are my captive subjects, a social scientist’s dream! They are prey to my stealthy researcher’s gaze. At my leisure, I can try to figure out what makes them tick. I make up stories about them. Of course, I’m wrong a lot, but who knows? I’m not an untrained observer. I have hunches about people that are backed by loads of research. Social scientists can predict a lot about people, you know, even if their individual stories elude us in much of their detail. I’m certainly as good as GRIOT™[3]in figuring out what people’s life chances are. 

I’m having a hard time not staring at people too much, especially the more exotic ones like the fifty-something woman bleached blond, long stringy hair in leopard patterned tights, wearing red heels and a fur-lined vest over what looks like an ill-fitting red tank top, to match her shoes I expect. I somehow tear myself away from the spectacle and return to my reading. Vonnegut is his usual scathing self, his words are sometimes like little grenades, at other times like machine gun fire blowing the world’s silliness to bits. 

A big guy shuffles by us.  Well over 182 centimetres tall, slovenly, scruffy beard, thin, scraggly longish hair, battered old jeans, T-shirt with his hairy belly peeking out over his beltless jeans. I know nothing about him except for his appearance and demeanor. He is plugged into huge earphones. With his deeply furrowed brow, he is sadness and angst personified. A few minutes pass, he gets a chocolate bar out of the vending machine across the aisle, and he slowly walks down the starboard side of the ship towards a bank of almost empty seats and sits down at a window seat, fourth from the aisle. He’s almost out of sight. Vonnegut would have a field day with him.

If it’s possible to make any inference about a person’s sense of self based on their appearance and demeanor, I would say that there are quite a few people aboard who are sartorially indifferent. There are exposed butt cracks everywhere. There might be wealthy passengers aboard. Maybe not. One can’t always identify wealth by what it wears. There are a few BMWs, Mercedes, Audis, and such on the car decks below, intermingled with dirty old pickups, beaters, Toyotas and Hondas, but an expensive car is not necessarily an indicator of the owner’s wealth. It could be a commentary on their borrowing power. No, I think most of us on this boat are just plain ol’ working class folk hopelessly in debt. True Canadians. 

There are lots of young people on this boat. That’s strange because it’s a week day. Most of them haven’t experienced the alienation of work yet. Too young. Their age and inexperience seem to give them license to be brash and uncouth. So charming! This one kid, maybe fifteen years old, has the crotch of his jeans hanging around his knees forcing him to waddle around the forward lounge of the ship rather than walk upright.  One of his buddies has his hoodie so tight around his head I’m sure it’s constricting the blood supply to his brain. Careful you don’t pass out, kid!

There’s the usual contingent of the over sixty-five set on this boat. Lots of couples like us. We old folks get on for free as passengers Monday to Thursday and that does encourage us to get off the island and visit the kids and grandkids on the Mainland from time to time. Lots of grey-haired ladies and gents still read books it seems. Deliberately looking around now I see an older woman sitting by herself, coiffed and dyed hair, prim and properly suited, reading A Handmaid’s Tale. A guy about sixty-five with a long grey-speckled beard and slouching in a seat a couple of benches in front of us is reading The Sisters Brothers. His grey sweatpants are stained front and back with splotches of who knows what. Delightful! At least these two, whatever other qualities they have, show good taste in reading material, but I look around and see quite a few iPads and Kindles, smartphones too. It’s just not true that older people are all computer phobic. Just some of us are.

A woman about thirty, dark hair, slim, dressed in a dark green ill-fitting suit, passes by me pushing a child in a wheelchair. She is moving slowly. There is something up with the child, obviously, but I have no idea what. He strikes me as being around eight years old, but he can’t speak from what I can see although he does make sounds. He looks at me, but I don’t know if he actually sees me or not. His mother, I assume she’s his mother, stops to talk to the guy reading The Sisters Brothers. I overhear some of their conversation, “You had lunch yet?” and it seems as though they are related somehow. Maybe he’s her father. I don’t want to think about any other relationship they might have. I don’t know. I’ guessing they’re related.

Rounding Bowen Island now, the passage has gone by so quickly. We arrive in Horseshoe Bay in fifteen minutes or so. Foot passengers are already milling around on deck 5 waiting for the gate to open to disgorge them onto the ramp down into the terminal and out to the waiting busses and taxis. 

I checked my blood pressure before driving down to the ferry terminal this morning. It was fine: 126 over 65. That’s normal for me. So, that’s not the problem. A urologist removed my left kidney in 2002 because I had kidney cell cancer. Now I have high creatinine levels again. Fun and games! We’re headed to see a specialist in Vancouver. Maybe she can figure it out what my problem is. Something isn’t quite right, that’s for sure. 

I can’t stop thinking about my mother. The way she died, demented and drugged. Come to think of it, her mother died the same way. For some reason I don’t think I’ll get to die that way, but I can’t rule out drugs being involved. So it goes.

[1]Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. (1990) Hocus Pocus, New York: Putnam, page 146.

[2]To read about death denial and immortality projects see: Becker, Ernest (1973). The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster.

[3]To know what the reference to GRIOT™ is here you’ll just have to read Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus.

Ship (a canoe, really) of fools!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Ship of Fools.

Alright, I have a confession to make. I’m not always the most reasonable person around. The photo above is of our fifty-year-old, sixteen foot “Huron” canoe outfitted with outriggers, a mast and sail, along with a deep-cycle battery and an electric motor, and paddles of course. First off, it’s a canoe, not a sailboat, but it did sail very well in moderate to somewhat higher winds. It’s tied here to a stump on Buttle Lake near Ralph River Provincial Campground where we recently spent a few days. The lake was relatively calm. We probably paddled and used the motor to get to this spot not far away from the campground. 

On another day, however, we went out in relative calm and while we were out there, the wind blew up. It often does in the afternoons on Buttle Lake. We sailed very quickly to a spot down the lake called Auger Point, a three-kilometre run. Getting back from there was anything but pleasant. We should have known better. Happily, we had the motor that I cranked to full power but even with that we had to paddle at ramming speed to get back to the river mouth where we kept the boat tied up, maybe a kilometre to our camp site. That was one tiring run home. It would have been different had we been able to sail closer to the wind, but with the sail we had and the lack of a leeboard, we were in for a rough upwind fight. Carolyn and I are experienced canoeists and at no time did I feel like we were in trouble, but paddling as hard as we could was feasible even ten years ago, not so much now that I’m 72 and Carolyn is handicapped by arthritis in her hands. Still, we are strong paddlers and we made it without swearing and berating ourselves too much. Now, having done this once and also having promised ourselves to never do it again, what do we do? We go out there again on another day and get caught in the snottiest wind and wave conditions I think I’ve ever seen on the lake. What can I say? Again, we went out on a day that promised to be benign so we headed up the lake looking for a nice place to swim. We paddled down to a bay maybe four kilometers from the campground but there was someone on the beach playing music and fishing from shore. So, we headed down and across the lake to a bay still some distance from the campground where we knew we could skinny dip. As we enjoyed the beautiful lake water and the most enjoyable swim, the lake decided to turn against us, and the wind started blowing strongly from the north. We set out with the motor at half throttle, but we soon had to up that to full throttle and full on paddle to boot. Well, we’ve had some situations in the past where we paddled as hard as we could against a wind without making much headway at all. But we were young then and had much more energy and stamina than we do now. Coming around the point close to the campground we were hit with two-foot chop. That was fine as long as we were able to paddle directly into the wind, but that was not possible as we rounded the point moving east towards the campground. We were abreast to the wind, paddling as hard as we could with the assistance of the motor, and we were being beaten hard by the waves to the point where we started taking on water from the port side. Sensing that we probably couldn’t make it back to the river’s mouth where we would have preferred to leave the boat, we turned the boat downwind and took her into shore on a muddy, unpleasant part of the lakeshore, but still within easy walking distance to our campsite. That’s where she stayed overnight. 

The next morning, we took her around to the river’s mouth. We were exhausted, especially me, and I hurt everywhere. Silly us. After that episode, we got reasonable and didn’t do it again. Actually, we got our best swim of our stay on Buttle Lake a couple of days later with no trouble. 

The family joined us last Thursday and that was great, but I felt a pain in my right side and shoulder that was getting worse and worse. There’s no doubt in my mind that fighting the extreme winds on Buttle not once but twice contributed significantly to my injury. I was definitely injured. The pain got so bad (pushing 9.5 out of 10) that I was very relieved to know that I had some T3s in my toiletry bag. I took two and felt hardly any relief. Later, I took two more along with some CBD and THC (I have a prescription for them). I managed to sleep fitfully although some people might suggest I was not sleeping as much as in an altered state of mind. The next day the pain had not attenuated at all, and we had to leave the campsite and head home. I couldn’t help pack up at all and my son-in-law was conscripted to drive the truck home towing our old eighteen-foot Holidaire trailer. I could barely sit still on the way home, having to shift my weight often to try to lessen the pain. The drive home was uneventful, but I still hurt, easily pushing 6 out of 10. 

After being home for a bit and still at the end of my rope trying to deal with pain that prevented me from even taking a deep breath, I took two ibuprophen, went to bed for an hour or so and got up feeling fine. A miraculous recovery! I would have taken ibuprophen a lot earlier, but I was counselled in 2002 after my left kidney was removed because of cancer that I should avoid anti-inflammatory meds. I didn’t take any until this past weekend and just took two more a few minutes ago. The meds are still keeping the pain at bay, but I’m loathe to keep taking anti-inflammatory meds like ibuprophen because they are hard on the kidneys. So, tomorrow I call my doctor and make an appointment to see if there are any alternatives to ibuprophen I can take that might help mitigate acute pain. I’m used to chronic pain, but the acute pain brought on by the foolishness in our canoe was untouched by acetaminophen, even with codeine, and even supplemented with CBD and THC. My problem seemed to me clearly one of muscular inflammation. It’s clear that I need a solution to deal with acute pain because I can’t promise to always be reasonable in the future. My family was extremely supportive, and I love it for that, but I feel that I need to pull my own weight too. I will not always have my family there to support me if I get into unreasonable trouble again. I need good meds too!