THE CANCER DRUG

Cancer Opens One's Eyes to the Many Facets of Marijuana.

Ahh, cancer. One learns so much from being diagnosed with a
death-sentence disease. Of course, 95% of it is stuff you would
rather not know, but that other 5% is downright interesting. For
example, "America's Next Top Model" is much more fun to watch when
you've lost 15 pounds without trying. During chemotherapy, vanilla
smells good, but vanilla wafers taste disgusting. And eyelashes
really do have a purpose; without them, my eyes are a dust magnet.

But the most compelling fact I learned was about my friends. Not just
what you would expect: how they cooked for my family and picked up my
kids and took me to doctors and pretended not to notice how bad I
looked and, most important, that I could not -- cannot -- survive without them.

No, what really shocked me was how many of my old, dear, married,
parenting, job-holding friends smoke pot. I am not kidding. People I
never expected dropped by to deliver joints and buds and private
stash. The DEA could have set a security cam over my front door and
made some serious dents in the marijuana trade. The poets and
musicians were not a surprise, but lawyers? CEOs? Republicans? Across
the ideological spectrum, a lot of my buddies are stoners. Who knew?

OK, I admit it, in college I smoked dope with the rest of them. I
mean, everybody was doing it -- an excuse I do not allow my children
- -- and at parties I didn't want to be uncool. Plus, I felt my only
other option was alcohol, and the sweet drinks I liked were too
fattening. But that was a long time ago, and since then I have
learned to drink bourbon straight, get high on life and appreciate
the advantages of not doing anything you wouldn't want your kids to do.

I thought all my friends felt the same. Boy, was I wrong. When I
surfaced from my chemo haze enough to care about anyone else, I was
curious. Why do so many 40- and 50-somethings still get high? I asked
my suppliers. Pain was the No. 1 answer. Not just the psychic angst
of being mothers and fathers to teenagers, but real physical pain.
We're all beginning to fall apart, and for those who imbibe, a couple
of tokes really take the edge off the sciatica, rotator cuff
injuries, irritable bowel syndrome and migraines.

The second biggest reason was anxiety. Perhaps we can blame politics
for middle-age pot use: the war, the environment, the loss of our
civil liberties, little things like that.

Obviously some of us use drugs to ease the lives of quiet desperation
we never thought we would have back when we were getting stoned the
first time. Our drug use now is really the same as in college. Then I
got high to relax, to gain confidence, to forget I was an overweight,
mediocre college student terrified of the future. Now we get stoned
to relax, forget our disappointing careers and mask our terror of not
just our own future but the future for our kids as well. Is it so
different from my dad coming home from work and having a couple of
martinis? Or my mother and those little prescribed pills she took
when she felt "nervous"? At least -- we can rationalize -- marijuana
is all natural.

I spoke to my oncologist about the pros and cons of marijuana use for
cancer patients. He said he was part of a study 25 years ago on the
effects of pot on nausea, joint pain and fatigue caused by
chemotherapy. It worked then, he said; it really helped some people.
But now they have great new drugs, such as Emend, dexamethasone and
Ativan, that keep the nausea and other pain at bay. He said the
people who use pot now do it because they like it. Or maybe they use
it because they would rather support a farm in Humboldt County than a
huge pharmaceutical conglomerate.

After chemo No. 1, I was violently ill. Anti-nausea drugs
notwithstanding, I was hugging the porcelain throne. My body did not
want to be poisoned; I guess it liked cancer better. I was willing to
try anything, so I lit up. It helped. A lot. I collapsed on the
couch, I zoned out watching "Project Runway," I was able to take deep
breaths without puking.

My 15-year-old daughter was shocked. The look on her face was proof
that her elementary school D.A.R.E. program had really done its job.
A friend -- not a supplier or a user -- explained to her it was just
to make me feel better and that if it worked, wouldn't that be great?
My daughter reluctantly agreed, but I knew she didn't mean it. I had
come full circle in my life -- the next time I had a toke, I stood in
my bathroom with the fan on, blowing smoke out the window, but
instead of my parents, I was scared my kids would find out I was
smoking dope again.

The biggest pain of cancer is the gnawing, scratching, bleeding dread
that they didn't find it all, that you didn't go to the doctor soon
enough, that it is growing out of control at this very moment. My
doctor recommended meditation. Yeah, right, I thought, more time
sitting quietly trying not to think about dying. I had carpool for
that. Meanwhile, I lost all taste for alcohol. Even half a glass of
wimpy white wine could make me toss my cookies, so I turned to my
friend Mary Jane occasionally, only when nothing else would do.

In the middle of one post-chemo night, my husband was out of town and
I was sick and I got up and tried to get the little pipe lit and take
one hit so I could maybe sleep. My son heard me struggling and he
came into my bedroom. He lit the match for me and showed me where to
put my finger on the "carburetor," the hole on the side of the pipe,
to make it draw. I was too grateful to ask him how he knew all this.
He stayed with me until I felt better. It was mother-son bonding in a new way.

Just another reason to say: Thank you, cancer.