Month: June 2022

Both my sister and my father have severe kidney disease.

They get kidney stones monthly and often have to get surgery for impacted stones when they’re not able to pass them like a normal person.

That’s because the stones that form in their kidneys are sometimes as large as 7mm or bigger. That’s nearly the entire diameter of the urethra itself, which is a nastily big rock to have going through your urinary tract. Naturally, these stones produce absolutely insane levels of pain for both my sister and my father. While my father absolutely refuses to take opiate pain medication these days after problems with dependency in the past, my sister still readily takes them when they’re offered to her. It’s a dangerous affair, but I can’t judge her for using them. My personal doctor told me that he’s watching a lot of people give up their prescription pain medications after they start using strong cannabis products. It’s not a matter of microdosing THC to replace opiates—typically you need a strong dose of marijuana to replicate the effects of an opiate narcotic. Surely this doesn’t work for everyone, but I can imagine there are large numbers of people who are able to make the transition and quit taking narcotics in favor of cannabis instead. It also depends on what exact kind of pain you’re trying to treat as well. Although cannabis can be phenomenal at treating emotional pain and digestive pain, it’s not always suited for subsing the tenderness that comes from having a kidney stone. It’s a whole different issue altogether.

 

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I’m happy to try new cannabis products when they’re made available.

When my state first unveiled medical marijuana in 2016, the available products were fairly dismal. Everything was made from cannabis distillate oil which contained roughly THC, a few other cannabinoids, and botanical terpenes that didn’t actually match the profiles of the strains they were intended to mimic. The first cannabis flower products were sold in pre-filled pods that were intended to go inside cannabis dry herb vaporizers because our state legislature was convinced there was no medical value to smoking marijuana. I remember hearing them echo the sentiment that you didn’t “smoke medicine,” but there were many doctors that stepped forward who said exactly the opposite. A judge ordered that the smoking ban was unconstitutional, but the previous governor kept appealing the decision until the recent governor caved to pressure when he took office. I don’t like him, but I’m happy he followed the law that 70% of the state supported when they voted for it in 2016. After that smoking ban ended, nearly all of the existing cannabis dispensary companies jumped on board with selling flower products in their stores. You can buy whole flowers or pre-rolled joints of cannabis flower buds. However, many of the pre-rolled joints offered by marijuana companies in this state are made from the lowest quality material. All of the shake, trim, and left-overs are used for pre-rolled joints at most cannabis dispensaries. Only a few make pre-rolled joints out of whole flower buds that are ground down. Naturally, those are much better quality pre-rolled joints than the ones made out of the garbage that would usually go into an extraction run.

 

Cannabis products

Before the recent years of cannabis legalization in this state, I was deathly afraid of people finding out that I used weed.

There was still a heavy stigma associated with marijuana consumption, especially in places of employment.

I remember asking a friend of mine for some of his urine to pass a drug test in late 2014 when I accepted a job offer at a newspaper where I’d been employed as a contract employee for several years at that point. It was a daunting experience and I was scared to death that I was going to get caught with that extra vial of urine inside my pants. Thankfully nothing bad happened and I was able to get through with no incident. Things have changed so much in my state since we legalized cannabis for medical use back in 2016. I never noticed the smell of cannabis in parking lots anymore than I remember smelling it on peoples’ clothing inside actual stores. But now that it has been six years since we unveiled legal medical cannabis in this state, I’m smelling a strong aroma of marijuana on people in all sorts of settings. While it is usually while I’m grocery shopping at a local store, that’s not always the case. Someone at work walked in the other day smelling like they had smoked a blunt on their way to the office. I’m surprised they didn’t get outed by people around them and sent home for using unapproved drugs. As much as I love medical marijuana as much as the next person, I wouldn’t risk getting in trouble smoking weed on the way to work when I could smell like a hippy bus in the process.

Girl scout cookies

It’s important for me to feel like I’m saving money whenever I go to the store to complete a shopping list I’ve been working on for several days.

If I’m going to drop $100 or more on groceries and supplies, I want to utilize whatever coupons and sales promotions that are available to me.

It’s not always easy to find these savings if you’re not proactive about looking at sales papers each week, which are typically found on store websites and phone applications. One of my favorite grocery stores is always running their buy-one, get-one-free deals and the products offered are always in rotation. Some weeks you’ll find critical meat products on sale while other days you’ll end up with cereal, cookies, or other snack food. Now that inflation has raised all of the prices at the grocery store, looking for sales and promotions is a critical step at this point in time. While inflation doesn’t really drive the prices at the cannabis stores, it is still equally important to shop all of the sales and promotions at your local weed dispensaries. There are sales every single week, even if it requires shopping at more than one weed store. That’s how I’m able to afford all of the cannabis I smoke, because without the sale prices I don’t know what I would do. The cost of marijuana would be so burdensome that I don’t know if I’d be able to use it daily any longer. Some of the dispensaries also offer discounts for SNAP recipients and veterans that can be stacked on top of existing discounts. There has never been a better time to be a cannabis user.

 

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The body is a magical and yet mystifying organism.

In the right circumstances, our bodies can heal themselves from nearly anything. But at some point, this old body needed more help with setting up the right circumstances for healing. Medical marijuana and the good folks at the legal weed store are helping me with just that. I’ve had surgery before and it wasn’t the worst thing in the world but I was definitely on the long end of healing. So when I went into this recent surgery not expecting much different. This was a pretty average, yet still invasive procedure to repair an old injury that was causing a fair amount of pain and wasn’t going to get better. It did not go well. The procedure itself went as planned from a surgical perspective but my body reacted badly to the surger. I wasn’t healing right. So I turned to a more holistic approach to my healing. Along with the medical marijuana benefits, I changed my diet, focused on rest and mediation. Also, I allowed myself to rest when I was tired. The medical cannabis for the cannabis dispensary helped me be real about the fact that I’m older, just had surgery and I needed to rest for my body to heal. I was new to legal weed shops so I’m really thankful the folks at the local cannabis store helped me get the right cannabis flower products to help me. The rate of healing has accelerated significantly in just weeks once I started feeding and resting my body properly. But the cannabis flower products have made a huge difference with managing pain, getting my rest and helping with my hopeful, positive outlook.

medical marijuana products