USING CANNABIS AND MUSHROOMS DURING CANCER TREATMENT

A NOTE FROM MY DAD

I don’t know how you prepare for it. It’s scary. Pancreatic cancer especially—I knew a few people who had it, and they passed away quickly. Everything you read about, along with some of the things the doctors told me early on—there wasn’t really any good news in it. The numbers around pancreatic cancer are undeniably dismal. My tumor couldn’t be surgically removed because it had spread to the liver, so from what I understood, the goal of treatment is to live as normally as you can, for as long as you can. That’s fairly sobering news. Everybody knows that life goes on for only so long, but I don’t know how you prepare for a diagnosis like that. “You have pancreatic cancer, it’s stage four, and it’s very unlikely that anything other than a predictable road to your demise is what’s coming next.” That’s what my story was.

The things that came to my mind first were all that I was going to miss—the things I had been looking forward to. This is probably true for everyone who’s faced with a serious health problem. This good life is going to be shorter than I had hoped, I thought. I was going to miss Ashley’s wedding, and how Game of Thrones ended. I was going to miss going to Myrtle Beach and playing golf with my high school friends.

My diagnosis came right before Thanksgiving, and the golf trip was planned for April. When I asked my doctor whether or not I’d make it to that golf trip, although his attitude was positive, he was noncommittal. So that felt really sad. As selfish as it sounds, I was worried that all the fun I had planned might not come true.

As I write this, it’s been more than two years since my diagnosis—and my story has changed. I feel great. I’m on vacation with my family, I’ve played golf several times this week . . . and I did get to see the end of Game of Thrones!

In the spring, I told my oncologist that I was out in the yard doing some cleanup after a bad winter. He shook his head and said, “Most people in your condition are lying on the couch watching old movies at this point.” I said, “I have plenty of energy, I have plenty of strength, and I feel good. So, I’m cutting up tree branches, doing yard work, and enjoying myself.”

My oncologist sees a lot of very sick people and has a lot of hard conversations. But in my meetings, there’s a lot of laughing. We have the same conversation every time. “Blood work is good, scans are terrific, you’re off the charts in terms of how well you’re doing. How’s your golf game?”

Early on, some of the questions the doctors and nurses asked me were: “Are you falling down? Do you have bad nausea? Are you dropping things yet? Can you still type?” and I thought, Uh oh—those are the things that are coming next. But they haven’t. Early on, I had a couple of bouts of nausea, but nothing like what you read about—no debilitating nausea at all.

I’m aware that my progress is atypical, being this deep into the disease that I have. Still, it doesn’t appear to be getting worse . . . and it might actually be getting better.

I’m conservative, generally a believer in science and Western medicine—always have been. The first thing that came to my mind when I got diagnosed was, I have cancer, I have to find the best cancer hospital that I can. My daughter Lisa helped me get an appointment at Dana Farber in Boston. It never even crossed my mind to think about alternative medicine. I was going to do whatever conventional Western medicine told me to do—that just made sense to me.

Until I saw a documentary about medical marijuana. I only recorded it because it looked interesting. Ever since the 1960s, when marijuana was common in college, I thought of it as an illegal recreational drug. I didn’t think it was dangerous, and I didn’t believe it was the worst thing you could do—but I certainly didn’t think of it as a medicine.

Yet here I was, watching a documentary where children having seizures were being given cannabis oil, after all conventional medicines they tried had been ineffective. The seizures immediately seemed to get better. You watch this and you say, “Okay, something’s here. I don’t know what it is, but this is pretty interesting.”

I researched a little further and found anecdotal story after story, and it appeared that this stuff has some medicinal power. I started to change my viewpoint. I started to think, Well, I’m going to go down the conventional medicine pathway, but if my oncologist says cannabis might do some good and it won’t do any harm, why not try it?

I trusted my daughter Jenny to guide me in creating a home regimen because she has as much history in researching these kinds of things as anybody I know. She’s studied nutrition and she’s an advocate for everything she believes might help people to feel healthier and live a better life. This seemed to be an extension of what she was already involved in.

Ever since Jenny has been studying nutrition, she’s spent a lot of time and energy trying to teach me about it—but I’m an old dog, and I don’t like too many new tricks. But this time, I thought—Maybe it’s time to learn a new trick.

When you’re sick, time is important. We decided in the course of just one day to get a medical marijuana card, get some CBD and medicinal mushrooms, and get started.

It’s hard to say what’s direct cause and effect, but it’s also hard for me to ignore the fact that I’m still as healthy as before I was diagnosed, and maybe healthier. Western medicine predicted that I’d be in much worse condition than I am.

Two years into chemo, I still have no nausea, and I have a lot fewer “old-man pains” than I used to have. I used to take over-the-counter pain medications every day for joint pain, but I don’t take those things anymore. After starting CBD oil, I just don’t have the same pain as I used to have. Something’s working.

Before now, the only mushrooms I had ever heard about in terms of medicines were—well, I don’t think I had heard of any, except things that were way on the fringes, like psilocybin. Medicinal mushrooms were nowhere near my field of view, so bringing them in was purely faith that they aren’t going to hurt me and that they might do some good.

In the two years since we’ve started this, it feels like the world has changed quite a bit. There’s certainly an increasing amount of evidence that cannabis and mushrooms can have a major impact on certain health issues, and it’s highly probable that this is not just a placebo effect.

I’ve since learned that the cannabis plant has been used as a medicine around the world for thousands of years. One hundred years ago, marijuana was demonized, even though there’s almost no evidence that there’s anything in it that’s bad for you. They turned it into a reefer-madness issue, which is still a big part of society. I don’t believe in that anymore. This is not something that’s going to do more harm than the potential good it can do. The evidence is mounting on a daily basis that it can be beneficial, so the idea that we’re still prohibiting it, to me, is wacky. But reefer madness has been so embedded in people’s brains, it’s hard to undo. But we can undo it, and it’s being undone now.

I’m committed to this. I believe it’s helping to keep me healthy, giving me a good quality of life, and extending my life a lot longer than the doctors would have thought.

When you go to the doctor and they say, “We can keep you alive for a while, but it won’t be all that pleasant. You’re going to have neuropathy and nausea, you’re going to be weak and tired and sick”—that’s when I think it’s time to add on to conventional medicine. I’m not going against conventional medicine, but I’m now much more open to trying alternatives. I think someday, these “alternatives” won’t be all that unconventional.

The more I hear about patients with cancer, I can see that it becomes a real emotional drain—a helplessness. I don’t feel that way. Of course, you feel like you’re at the mercy of your cancer hospital in some respects, but I don’t feel emotionally down, because the idea that I could try something at home to support my treatment and have it work, well, that’s great. It’s invigorating. I get up, I feel good, I continue to mark off the months on the calendar, and nothing is going wrong. It’s emotionally uplifting. I don’t get depressed very often. Of course, I wish I wasn’t on this path—but it’s still been a pretty interesting and positive experience. It’s actually been kind of fun to try all of this, and to see it working. If it wasn’t working, it wouldn’t be any fun at all, but since it is, I’m going to continue to do it.

If what I’m sharing can help other people, and possibly accelerate the acceptance of cannabis and mushrooms by people in the medical community, if I’m just one voice in an increasing number of voices that say, “Hey, you might want to look into this,” and help people see that maybe it doesn’t have to be a quick death sentence, if this gives the medical community another data point—well, all the better. The faster we can get to clinical trials, the better off a lot of people are going to be. So how could I not share this?

Today, it’s not only “So far, so good.” It’s “So far, unbelievably good.” There are so few positive outcomes with this disease that my oncologist told us to share every positive thing about this story that we possibly can. This has been a very pleasant surprise, and I believe that we caused it—at least some of it—by taking some action at home, in conjunction with conventional medicine.

This might sound crazy, but this has been one of the best times of my life. The specifics of getting chemotherapy aren’t pleasant, but the last two years have been phenomenally fun. I’m spending much more time with my family and friends. Every day, week, month (and now, every year) ends up being a gift. I’m not just lying on the couch watching movies.

If I didn’t know I was sick, I wouldn’t know I was sick—and I’m having the time of my life. It’s just the truth.

What I wish for you, the reader of this book, if you’re open-minded enough to try what I’m trying, is that you get up and take some action. My experience is my experience, but trying cannabis and mushrooms probably won’t hurt, it could do some good, and it could improve your probabilities. There’s a lot of hope that you can feel better than your doctors think you can—better than you think you can.

If there’s one thing I can say for sure, it’s this:

Even if the probabilities aren’t great, the possibilities are great.

Ray Sansouci