Julie Gardener
New Member
Epilepsy by Anonymous
My son was diagnosed with epilepsy three weeks before his 21st birthday. They started out as grand mal seizures and grew in frequency and intensity as time went on. He has been on every antiepileptic drug out there to no avail. He was a young man with many aspirations for his life, full of joking and fun and a passion for boating and fishing like nobody's business. He was going to join the Coast Guard or marine patrol. All those dreams were taken away. He worked as a mate on boats at the time of his first seizure, but after he was diagnosed with epilepsy he was shunned by everyone in the industry. He used marijuana at first just to take away the nausea and severe headaches after the seizures. He was able to find relief and recuperate after a couple of days instead of being sick and disoriented for over a week after a seizure. Now as a mother, the last thing I wanted was for an illegal drug to be used to help in his epilepsy. So I dragged him to all kinds of nutritionists, biofeedback, some kind of neuron-feedback on the computer.... everything! Then he started smoking mj right when he woke up and he would get through the day without a seizure. After years seizures were more frequent, and there were many different types---...petit, gran mal, absence, all the seizures I have read about. The regime of waking up and immediately smoking made an incredible difference. He would have sometimes just a petit one in the afternoon but snap right out of it. The mj was helping physically, but we were not getting enough support in other ways, and my son got involved with the even more illegal end of drugs ( I don't want to incriminate him more by spelling this out), and now he's looking at a serious jail sentence. Although no one would hire him because he's epileptic, Social Security did not deem him eligible for anything because they say you can still work with epilepsy. If he went to jail he would probably die there, because his seizures are so bad without the MJ. Even if he gets probation, I can't find a doctor in Florida who would prescribe Marinol. It's just a mother's biggest heartache. I thought nothing but death itself could be worse than these horrible debilitating seizures, and the mj helped, but now the mj will probably give him a jail sentence and he will be worse off than ever. Had it been legal, we almost could have gone on with life a little more normally.
Source: Comments and Observations
