Tweak Your Oblique? Don't Freak!

Tweak Your Oblique?  Don’t Freak!

Call it cannabis, reefer, pot, marijuana, ganja, grass, happy smoke, or the ever-popular devil’s weed, this plant has an infinite capacity for healing and benevolence that Corporate America refuses to acknowledge. On a daily basis, I benefit from cannabis in its many forms, in a variety of ways.

I have used cannabis as a mood stabilizer most of my adult life. I was unaware of the underlying reasons for my use, but it has always been a way to keep my mania at bay. As ironic as it sounds, getting high keeps me from being high. Besides, the reality is that my indulgence is not so much for the getting high, as merely maintaining the appropriate level of THC in my body. 

Upon the extremely rare instance of me taking a header under the blankets/pillows for the depressive side of bipolarism, cannabis obviously brings me up and gradually out of my funk. Unlike many who suffer from depression, my bouts always have a trigger so it’s not quite so arbitrary. Regardless, cannabis is ultimately going to be my ticket out of the dark.

I wear sandals because I don’t like the feeling of confinement created by shoes. Consequently, my heels and the balls of my feet develop cracks and fissures that make those of the Grand Canyon, look like finger-nail scratches, if I do not apply Amber's cannabis salve on a daily basis.

If I begin in the early spring to apply the salve every day, I never develop the cracks in the first place. If they are already so advanced, that the pain resonates out from the depths of the heel, making it almost impossible to walk, the salve goes to work immediately as far as pain relief, and over the course of the next month or so, not only heels the cracks, but returns my heel(s) to full health.

I had reconstructive surgery on my right shoulder in 2004, because I took it too far one weekend in hauling a tree out of a ravine. My labrum, which is the socket that houses my arm, developed a series of chips in it, and if I raise my right arm suddenly up in the air now, it will come out of its socket and ride the rim.

It takes some excruciating maneuvering to get it back in place, but hey, that’s just old-dude stuff, no big deal, ferris wheel, and all of that. The result is the kind of discomfort that most of America would reach for pain-relief, of a prescriptive nature. 

I turn to Amber’s tincture for the simple reason that even if I got down on my knees and groveled, the VA will simply say, No way, Jose. Amber recommended that I take a single dropper of the fiery substance, but I have found that for me, it’s more like three of the droppers, which coincidentally is also a teaspoonful. 

It goes right into the center of the “discomfort” and washes over the raw edges with a cloak of soothing cool. I hesitate to use the word pain, because if I were to admit to myself that something was painful every time I experienced discomfort, I would be a sniveling little such-and-such. Pain? Nah, that’s just a little discomfort.

I use the tincture for those deep aches and discomforts that afflict my lower back, or when I jolt my oblique. I hurt in originally in 1987, when I finished up one job and was so intent on moving to the next job site, I took my filled tool box, and heaved it with my left arm up and over the side of my truck.

I felt as though I had been pierced to the core with an icepick.

Yet I was committed to go help a dear friend haul plant material down from the top of a mountain, to keep his trimmers supplied, and I could not  “call in sick.” The first two or three twenty-minute round trips, hauling a huge bag of wet cannabis down the mountain, were agonizing.

I ingested as much of the product I was carrying, as possible, and still be able to walk, and went about my business ignoring the discomfort. A funny thing happened over the next hour: The discomfort gradually faded and I subsequently have found over the past 28 years that every time I tweak that oblique, I simply keep moving and hit the cannabis.

Poison oak, heat rashes, dry skin, sunburn, insect bites, cracked skin, especially from working with either concrete or dirt, are all prime examples of what I use cannabis for, on a daily basis. 

My sweetest of Apple Blossoms, who is a private person and does not like to be the subject of my public writing, will not mind my sharing one pertinent detail. She began juicing cannabis immediately upon being diagnosed with first kidney cancer, and then thyroid cancer, three years and change ago. 

Two years ago, nodules formed on her lungs and grew rapidly before they were noted and recorded in a full-body scan. She began taking Amber’s CBD tincture right away and her oncologist upped the frequency of the body scans from once every six months, to once every four months. The very next time she had one of those scans, the progress of the growth of the nodules had been arrested; there was no advance.

The nodules have continued to remain inactive. If I were not already a convert to the church of cannabis, this divine intervention in the growth of a frightening specter in our lives, would have me in the river, ready to dunk my head. 

I recently became aware of a man who was around the same age as my sons, who had two young daughters and a supportive wife, and was afflicted with seizures. This individual was a firefighter/EMT by trade and had to give it up. 

His doctors did what they could in terms of monitoring and medicating him, but they had no definitive answers. A mutual acquaintance appealed to me and HappyDay Farms to see if there was a way that some CBD oil could be obtained for this person.

The end result is that this man’s life has been transformed. His access to the oil extracted from the cannabis has allowed him to do things that he had been incapable of doing for quite some time.

With all of the work that Hezekiah, Casey, Lito and Amber have done in the past eighteen months or more, to get the California Growers Association up and running, it is appropriate that we start educating those who are not aware, that cannabis is the source of a vast wealth of medicinal cures for countless issues.

So many uses for both physical and mental problems have been documented, that it is nothing short of a miracle. For me personally, every day that cannabis continues to fight the disease which is trying to slow down my Sweetest of Apple Blossoms, is one more day that I resonate with appreciation and gratitude for this gentle giant of a plant.