Stapler Story
Originally posted at Huckleberries Online
So I get up this morning and within 10 minutes I am sitting at my desk in agony, having stapled a staple all the way into my thumb while trying to hang one of Sunday Girl’s pretty watercolors on my bookshelf. It was stuck so tight I thought it would not come out, but I twisted and pulled and it came. There was quite a lot of blood – more than I wanted to see this morning. Careful with the staplers, friends!##
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Wide Power Outage In Franklin
Zaxby’s is open. So, just pluck it good for us, OK?##
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Tennessee Marijuana Patients Share Grief, and Tell How Pot Relieved It
MARIJUANA EDUCATION DAY HELD SATURDAY IN NASHVILLE:
BRENDA BATEY, CONSTANCE GEE, CHAD FOWLER, JOHN DONOVAN
SHARE PAIN OF THEIR ILLNESSES, AND HOW THEY FOUND RELIEF
John Donovan; Constance Gee; Chad Fowler; Brenda Batey; and Bernie Ellis. Chronic Discontent Photo
Updated 9:59 p.m. Sunday, January 29, 2012
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – As a Vanderbilt University professor and wife of the chancellor Constance Gee lived a very public life and knew it was dangerous to have marijuana in the house, but if something keeps you from crawling to the toilet and vomiting in the middle of the night you find a hiding place for it and take your chances.
“I was living in a fish-bowl, basically,” said Gee, a panelist at Tennessee’s first Marijuana Education Day held Saturday at Sunset Grill in Nashville.
Gee used marijuana to counter the effects of Meniere’s disease, an inner-ear ailment which causes “all-out vertigo attacks; they’re called ‘drop attacks,” she explained. She awoke Oct. 30, 2004 and “there was this really loud static noise in my ear,” she said. It grew worse. By the following February she often found herself on the bathroom floor at night. “I would throw up bile, and pass out, and throw up in-between,” she said.
Gee
A friend from Pennsylvania visited Gee at Vanderbilt and brought along a stash of marijuana. She advised Gee to try it, for the nausea. Gee had been through a number of drugs by then: anti-emetics, anti-nausea, even suppositories. “I couldn’t keep drugs down so they tried a different way,” she said.
It had been “a long long time” since she had smoked marijuana – since art school in the 1970s. But she tried it.
“It took about a minute and the nausea was gone,” said Gee.
Now she had relief, but also another problem: hiding her new treatments from the constant stream of visitors.
“I lived in the chancellor’s residence and there were people there all the time,” she said. “Someone in the house found out, and they notified general counsel, and the (Vanderbilt) board.”
This had happened under her nose, but without her knowledge. Worse, the national news media, zeroing in on her husband who has been the highest paid university leader in America, got wind of the story. In September 2006 The Wall Street Journal had a front page scoop sub-headlined, ‘Marijuana in the Mansion’; for Gee, it was a painful public outing.
“They’d spent five months snooping and they knew everything,” she said of the New York paper. “I was completely cowed when I went through that experience. … I was really afraid.”
She immediately stopped smoking marijuana. She had two surgeries. Meanwhile, her marijuana use was “used as a bludgeon” against her husband. Attorneys would not let her comment.
“I was really trying to hold my marriage together,” said Gee. “It didn’t survive.”
PAINFUL KNOWLEDGE
Brenda Batey has suffered for the knowledge she shares.
“If any of you are diagnosed with cancer just call me ’cause I know everything, now,” said Batey, social editor of the Green Hills News in Nashville and another panelist who spoke to some 40-50 attendees at Marijuana Education Day.
Batey
While undergoing about 100 chemotherapy treatments, Batey found the only thing that beat her nausea was marijuana. She said the effect was “like magic,” “a complete turnaround” and “a God-send.”
She said drugs that cost thousands of dollars more don’t help as much as marijuana, so that’s what she used. She knew there could be penalties.
“There was nothing they could do to me that was worse than what I was going through,” said Batey, who after smoking marijuana “didn’t feel high.”
“I just felt normal,” she said. “And I didn’t feel sick.”
SOLDIERING ON
Chad Fowler did his duty for his country, and now he wants a favor from his state: legal and safe access to medical marijuana.
He opened his Marijuana Education Day comments by thanking his wife and son.
“I’m putting them at risk by being here today,” said Fowler.
The former 101st Airborne infantry soldier was honorably discharged from the Army in 2001, with 20 percent disability, due to a degenerative bone disease. He was 25 and found himself seeking solutions at the Veteran’s Administration hospital. They used morphine “to get me upright and walking,” he said, and then started in with the Percocets, the Lortabs, the muscle relaxers; he was taking three such drugs regularly by the time he was 30.
Summoning his courage, Fowler began replacing these drugs with marijuana, and found hope. He has testified before the Tennessee Legislature in favor of a pending medical marijuana bill in past years, but the long wait is showing.
“I’ve talked about this so long,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion. “I’m tired, man. I’m tired.”
Yet Fowler soldiers on.
“It upsets me and I’m fired up about this,” he told the crowd. In the military, he said, they taught him “to stand up for what I believe in and do what is right.”
“Here I am,” he said. “We as patients can only do so much. We really need help from y’all. That’s why I’m thankful that everybody’s here.”
‘NOT A COINCIDENCE’
John Donovan looks healthy enough. His disease hides.
He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at 16, in 2001, and soon lost 100 pounds and “could barely walk.” He spent a lot of time, 18 hours at a time, on the couch. “This was pretty rapid,” he said of the disease’s advance.
Donovan
A friend stopped by one day with marijuana. Why not try it?
“When I smoked, things felt better,” said Donovan. “I still didn’t see it as a medicine. As a 16-year-old kid trying to fit in … the last thing that I needed was an added thing” that might make him strange to his peers.
In 2004 he got out of high school and learned about California’s Prop 215, passed in 1996, which allows that state’s residents to use marijuana for medical purposes. Sixteen states and Washington, D.C. allow medical marijuana use.
“Maybe there were people out there that were like me,” he said, and he began to study.
“What was going on with me wasn’t a coincidence,” Donovan said he discovered.
He has since used cannabis as an alternative to other medications. He believes in it enough to go public as a medical marijuana patient, writing about it in a Chattanooga paper.
“I feel healthier than I have at any given moment of my life,” he said.
Bernie Ellis, moderator of the panel and author of Tennessee’s Safe Access to Medical Cannabis Act, which could see progress this year, said passing it is not just a matter of science. He believes prohibition of marijuana is “immoral.”
“We cannot afford silence anymore,” said Ellis. “We cannot afford shame anymore. We cannot afford fear anymore.”
Visiting speaker Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws in Washington, D.C., told the audience much progress has been made in recent years, and urged them to keep working. Marijuana Education Day was sponsored by Tennessee NORML.
In some places, said Stroup, it’s easy to talk about marijuana law reform.
“In states like Tennessee, it’s not so easy … and I understand that,” he said. However, “It is now becoming acceptable to stick your head above the firing line.”
“Don’t think we’re not making progress, folks. We are on the cusp of winning this issue,” he told the audience.
“Marijuana smokers are just average citizens … it makes no sense to treat us like criminals.”##
Thomas Brent Andrews
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New Tennessee NORML Website
I’ve added link in the blogroll today for the new Tennessee NORML Website. Check it out here. Thanks Malcolm!##
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