Legal Weed Series – Illegally Healed Part 1
Legal Weed: Illegally Healed Part 1
By Mark M. Ward
As of recent, I was fortunate to be contacted by Pamela Thrash and I am honored to hear and recount her story. Speaking to Pamela you would see and hear a vibrant individual full of vigor and life. This couldn’t have been father from the case not so very long ago. Pamela’s battle to survive started in 2010, at the age of 40. At the time when Pamela should have been enjoying watching her last child graduate her senior year of high school and a time that she should be starting to relish her life in comfort, she found herself having to fight for it.
Pamela raised her children with pride and love of a devoted mother, but before the last grown could leave the nest, she was given news no one is ready to hear…. she had developed squamous cell carcinoma of the Bartholin Gland. Pamela’s cancer specialist said that she was young and healthy; therefore they were going to preform treatments quickly and aggressively. And so they did, with seven long despairing weeks of chemotherapy and radiation. During her fifth week, treatment had to been stopped due to Pamela acquiring second degree burns. She only took one week to resume treatment, but it was a devastating side effect to encounter. Pamela was taken from a young and healthy individual to feeling as if she was nearing her final days. And again, all while trying to just make it through her daughter’s last year of high school.
Once the treatments were finished in March of 2010, Pamela was given the fantastic news that the cancer had been beaten and all she had to do is go home and get better….or so she was told. In November she began having severe and frequent stomach pain with regular visits to doctors and emergency rooms. Pamela had lost health, 40 pounds and had lost her mother from November to March of 2011. On Pamela’s birthday, she was taken and admitted to hospital with infected gall bladder, pancreatitis and a perforated colon. Unknowingly, her colon had been tearing and leaking, so she was rushed to have surgeries to be cleansed of gangrenous areas. This repeated until surgeons were forced to remove half her colon and attach ostomy bags and ileostomy bags and reversals. Months on end in the hospital Pamela just lay watching life fall apart as she knew it. Due to trouble coping with feelings of helplessness and despair at a time of surgery after surgery, Pamela’s husband had left her, leaving her mortified.
Twenty plus colon surgeries later, Pamela decided that this was not saving her life…so she started pilgrimages back and forth to Colorado, so she could access a new regimen. Pamela had a chance to stay in Colorado, so she had packed everything in her car, including the meds she had been purchasing at dispensaries. But before she could make the move permanent, the medical refugee was detained by Kansas officials and charged with possession with intent to distribute and possession of paraphernalia.
She was at bottom, or so Pamela thought. This was until April of that year when she was then facing amputation of her right leg. At this time she was accepting a fate of cancerous consumption,
when Pamela then began a high THC and CBD regimen and using cannabis oil only for pain management. Then miraculously, her surgeons were amazed at the difference in tests since the new cannabis regimen. Even more astounding, doctors were even convinced it had a role in saving her leg from amputation and they have to admit it is working.
A once bleak existence is now showing promise and a new beginning. Pamela is now completely off of her pharmaceutical medication, a task she was told would never be accomplished. Also, Kansas had recently reduced her charges to two misdemeanors and six months unsupervised probation. Pamela accounts that she has been truly blessed to have found her cure and The Hope Grows Foundation, whom without their generous donation of their cannabis regimen; she feels she would not be here today. Pamela will now happily continue her fight to self-medicate, to live instead of exist and to be illegally healed.
