Healthier and Happier at 76 than at 64
Healing Myself: Shedding Seven Prescriptions and 30 Pounds Over 12 Years
How did I recover from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression, GERD, and arthritis? How did I tame the Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS) I'd suffered since childhood? It’s a long story, but here is the short version.
To begin my story, I’m asking you to consider a few words: caffeine, pinene, interoception, and adaptogen.
First, think about your relationship with caffeine. Perhaps coffee is the first thing you want when you get up, and you particularly like it with a donut for that extra sugar rush. But I think Perhaps you have rules about coffee like you can only have one cup or you can’t drink it after noon. Maybe there are a few lucky ones among us for whom caffeine is not a bother, and you can drink an espresso after dinner and sleep like a baby.
Whatever it is, I merely want you to think about how your body feels in relation to caffeine. How your brain feels, how your stomach feels, how your nerves feel when you have caffeine. OK, understand those feelings? Can you iterate the physical effects of caffeine? That’s interoception. Just google the term to learn more, or click here to read a good article in The Guardian.
Now, let’s move on to how you feel when you inhale pine in the middle of a forest, and it makes you feel like a million bucks. You are experiencing the adaptogen pinene. Click here to read how the Cleveland Clinic explains adaptogens, and to the extent that you can connect that feeling precisely to what is physically happening in your body, lungs, and brain, that’s interoception.
Still, I was telling you how I healed myself.
Restless Legs Syndrome was my biggest complaint. RLS has plagued me since childhood. It doesn’t kill you, but when it is chronic and severe, as mine was, it is a debilitating, world-class sleep thief. Connected with our circadian rhythms, RLS is worse when you are winding down in the evening to go to sleep.
I described the feeling as if dozens of night crawlers were squirming under the skin of my legs from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m., slithering, moving, having a dance fest: salsa, samba, tango, tap dance, waltz, watusi.
It used to be that if you knew the name of the condition at all, it was because Robin Williams or Rosie O’Donnell had done some pretty cruel skits about it, portraying people like me as spastics with mental defects who just couldn’t keep it together.
For years, I would wake up every day and ask myself who I would have to educate today about my malady because my behavior would be so odd that people would wonder if I was mentally healthy, squirming in my seat, crossing and uncrossing my legs every minute or two, getting up and down more frequently than anyone else, always positioning my place in a room where I could exit with the least commotion, always needing to sit on the aisle. I didn’t go to a play, concert, or movie for years because I simply couldn’t sit still. I moved so much that I garnered dirty looks from people around me, and more than once, strangers took it upon themselves to educate me on proper deportment in the theater.
Milestone Number One: Thirty years ago, I was 45, and Larry had just turned 50, so I subscribed to a Johns Hopkins Newsletter entitled “Your Health After 50.”
An article in the first issue described a condition that had made me miserable for decades, and they had a name for it: Restless Legs Syndrome. Johns Hopkins believed me. I had been womansplaining my symptoms to physicians for years and had been met with blank stares and had been given prescriptions for “nerves”, and this was the first time I knew for sure my symptoms weren’t psychosomatic. Johns Hopkins didn’t think I was crazy.
For the next twenty years, I saw the best doctors, became a National Restless Legs Syndrome Foundation board member, and eventually board president. I attended sleep medicine conventions and traveled to Hopkins and NIH. I had access to top clinicians, and I took the dozens of medicines they prescribed. Most had significant side effects. The meds were effective only up to a point, after which they stopped working.
Milestone Number Two: I was 64 when my doctor told me I needed a knee replacement,
but he wanted me to slim down to 160 before he okayed it. We discussed that I should not be 5’4” and weigh 175.
The knee replacement was successful, and that was fortunate because I had as much as I could handle dealing with chronic sleep deprivation. My legs twitched so much that sleep study technicians couldn’t calibrate the instruments needed to complete their tests.
Most nights, I slept three or four hours. I was taking five prescriptions for various chronic conditions plus always some new drug for RLS, often one that had just received FDA approval. I coffeed during the day and alcoholed at night.
I had knee surgery, and meeting my post-op physical therapist, Darrian Robinson, was key to my recovery. Parenthetically, Darrian Robinson’s grandfather silver-medaled in the 1936 Olympics, finishing a fraction of a second behind Jesse Owens. Darrian’s grandfather’s younger brother was an athlete we all know and admire. He was the first person to letter in all four sports at UCLA, the one who is credited with integrating baseball, and eventually wore number 42 on his LA Dodgers uniform and his name was Jackie Robinson.
So, Jackie Robinson‘s great-nephew walked into my house in 2007, two days after my knee replacement. Darrian, who still comes to our home to provide personal training and physical therapy for Larry and me, is kind, talented, caring, and hip. He asked me, “How are you going to get out from under all these drugs?” I didn’t have an answer.
Darrian and I are an odd couple. He has more than once been mistaken for Snoop Dogg, and on a good day, I can channel Martha Stewart. He is my son’s age, and I am his mother‘s age.
I didn’t have an answer to his question. How was I going to get off all these drugs? I already had a refillable prescription for Oxycontin, which was then and remains an accepted treatment for RLS. That was prescription number six, and now, prescription number seven was a second refillable opioid prescription that I could take until my knee was rehabbed. How did I avoid becoming addicted?
Darrian suggested I use cannabis. I laughed. I tried and failed. I couldn't smoke; I had asthma. I didn’t know what I was doing.
Although medical cannabis was legal in California, on the off-chance that I became national headlines (Grandmother Stockbroker Detained at Airport for Carrying Gummies), I told human resources I was doing it; that is, I was pursuing solutions from medical cannabis.
In those days, little information was available about medical marijuana, but I eventually found reputable sources offering gelcaps and under-the-tongue tinctures. Americans for Safe Access sponsored a conference in Washington, D.C., and I attended. The National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws sponsored Lobby Days in Sacramento, and I attended. At each event, I found others sifting through trash to find treasure.
The treasures I have found are hemp-derived and, therefore, under the 2018 Agriculture Bill's jurisdiction, legal in all fifty states.1 As Mitch McConnell will tell you because it’s a huge cash crop in Kentucky, hemp is simply a marijuana plant that contains less than three percent THC. THC, tetrahydrocannabinol, is merely one of over 100 phytochemicals in the cannabis plant, and nearly all have legitimate medicinal properties and aren’t psychotropic. Still, when I mention cannabis, everyone thinks THC because it is the most famous, the most infamous, the most abhorred, the most feared, the most loved because it is the one that is psychotropic, the one that clearly makes you high.
Many of the other phytochemicals, which all read like alphabet soup (CBD, CBG, CBC), have anti-inflammatory and other beneficial properties and many are considered adaptogens. The non-THC parts of cannabis are not drugs per se, but they react with receptors in your brain; remember our discussion of caffeine and pine? You definitely feel different, but not necessarily high.
Slowly, methodically, I have educated myself, most recently with the help of Megan Mbengue, RN, CEO of Trusted Cannanurse. As I have used tinctures, full-spectrum versions of cannabis, I have developed a body intuition that allowed me to understand the cause and effect of my ailments. We have all laughed at comedians who parody the hyper-awareness of a stoner: “Wow, man! Did you see the details on this leaf?” Remember our discussion of interoception? Slowly, I began to understand cause and effect.
I eat this, and I have RLS.
I eat this, and I have GERD.
I eat this, and my arthritis is worse in the morning.
I don’t eat this, and I don’t have high blood pressure.
I don’t eat this, and I don’t have high cholesterol.
I don’t drink alcohol, and I sleep better and am not depressed.
Layer by layer, I peeled away the crusted stress that had masqueraded as normal behavior for a type-A woman in a man’s job.
The most significant piece of the puzzle was that I healed a gut no one knew was sick.
Once I focused on my gut health, the dominoes of my illnesses tumbled away, and one by one, I shed prescriptions I had been on for years.
Within two weeks of eliminating gluten and dairy from my diet, I no longer needed medicine for high blood pressure.
Shortly after I began focusing on a plant-forward diet, I no longer needed medicine for high cholesterol.
With reduced inflammation from various animal proteins, my arthritis was manageable.
As I healed my gut, I no longer needed medicine for acid reflux.
When I stopped drinking, I no longer needed the antidepressants I had been on for 40 years.
My RLS subsided gradually. Occasionally, it returns, and I can usually pinpoint triggers to avoid in the future.
Eventually, I found blood tests that further identified food sensitivities and intolerances, fine-tuning how to avoid RLS triggers.
Today, my only prescriptions are estrogen cream and a maintenance inhaler. I don’t eat processed foods. I don’t buy anything with dictionary words on the label because preservatives and additives that keep food looking perfect are the things that bring back not only my RLS but also make me vulnerable to all of those other conditions I was suffering.
So, the cannabis products worked on the receptors in my brain to give me the gift of interoception that helped me figure out what was wrong. Changing my diet to plant-forward, organic, just the food, hold the chemicals, healed my gut, and those two phenomena, working in tandem, is how I healed myself: 12 years, 30 pounds, 7 prescriptions.
Please click on the link for information: Janice Hoffmann presents "Our Stories and How to Share Them" at the Muriel Faith O'Brien Education Series at Claremont Heritage on March 28 at 6:30 p.m.
https://www.trustedcannanurse.com/
I know what I did to gain the weight: I went from being a tea-totaling whole-foods plant-based eater to being a cheese-devouring stress-drinker. And I never seem to find the time to get out into nature and I don't even make time to walk. But I am inspired by your journey, so starting today, I'm making big changes.
After gaining 40lbs last year and feeling sicker than ever, I really needed to hear this. Now I realize what I need to do to regain my health. Thanks Janice!