Ministry of Pain
Footballguy
First of all I do not have cancer so let's not get sidetracked with any silliness. We have some folks who are going thru real tragedies right now or have suffered the loss of loved ones to this wicked disease recently in here. I do not need thoughts and prayers but I appreciate them all the same.
For the last few years I have reached out for help in the non traditional sense thru new age life coaches who are not armed with traditional doctorate degrees but one person in particular has done a lot of good for me. She helped me bridge the gap between my son and I, she helped me finish my degree at UM when I wanted to give up a couple times, she believed in me when others did not. She doesn't try to change who I am but always gets me to look at things from different perspectives.
If you follow my writing in here over the last 10+ years I think you can see some subtle changes in me, most people would even without a life coach, it's simply progressing thru life but I was a miserable person for a long time coming out of the recession and then of course other issues brought on by my own poor choices. Again she never judged me thankfully.
OK, so over the last year I have seen less and less of her because things have been rolling along pretty well. She has battled cancer in the last year but supposedly it was in remission. Well it's back in all it's glory and she is going to go thru chemo again, it's nasty. She has lung cancer and even though they prescribe powerful drugs she really needs the medicinal marijauna for serious reasons right now. Lung cancer patients have a big problem though, they can't smoke it.
To make things harder, she is 65 years old and really has no one her age to help her, no kids and no hubby. We live in Florida which at this moment is still completely marijuana-less even for medical purposes, all of it is illegal. Now she knows I smoke or have access to it rather easy so imagine the pain it must have caused her to call me, a client of hers no less who she has helped conquer NOT SMOKING at different points along the way over the last few years…she calls me for help. Help meaning she wants me to get her set up.
So of course I spring into action and we get a crock pot, 5 lbs of honey, and some herb and I go to her condo and start whipping this mixture up at her house. Honey n cannibas is not an exact science I gotta tell you but the recipes are out there for all on google. My life coach is usually dressed to the nines so this was a new experience with no wigs, hair that there is turned grey, house robes.
I'm kind of drained after all of this the last couple weeks. My wife has been beating me over the head to help her, and I am but I also am not the guy you want to lean on for everything in life. I was happy to help and quite frankly I don't know who else was gonna help her. She could have gotten help I guess if she asked enough folks but she came to me so I had to ask her why me?
Was it just she thought I was a pot junkie and could get it easy? She said not at all but that she felt she could trust me and that she learned as much from me in our sessions as I did from her. I asked her to explain a little further and she said I was the most combatant client she ever had in her 30 years of doing this, I said that doesn't sound good. She said I was the toughest because I questioned everything but also one of the most rewarding because of that.
She started chemo again and I packed up 12 mason jars of honey cooked for 8-12 hours with green rolled up in cheesecloth in the crock pot. She eats a few spoonfuls to deaden the pain. Her hair is starting to go again, it's awful watching it fall out in clumps so we decided to shave it off and go with ball caps and bandanas.
I don't talk to her the way I offer up some encouraging words in here at the FFA. We have real talks about what is likely to happen and we don't sugarcoat it. While we hope she pulls thru this we also talk about her work and all the good she has done the last 30 years making up for her time wasted to the bottle in her 20s and early 30s. I told her whatever crimes against humanity she thinks she committed when she was young that she has paid those debts 10x over and that her life was in no way wasted but rather impacted so many lives positively. She cried and told me no one ever told her that but then she smiled and I knew it was the right thing to say.
I told her if at any time she wants to stop the chemo and just run away somewhere nice and quiet to live out in dignity, I'm all there for her. But for now I am supporting the chemo and we hope it will work, she sure has more pain relief this time around for the chemo. She has no kids, no SO, her sister is a hot mess and not much help, she has an 85 year old father in New York who is not doing very well but she is hiding the cancer from him. I told her he knows whether she thinks so or not.
I'll be 40 in April kids, time flies by when you're having fun. I don't do much in life right, I've made a lot of bad choices but when I get the call which isn't all that often, but when I get the call I try hard to do what I am being called upon to do. I'm not much of a religious person, spiritual yes but religious not much. So when I say I answer the phone for God, I don't mean it the same way some of you would. I say God because I am lazy and cannot come up with a better explanation.
I bet other cancer victims are going thru similar things, lung cancer is not unique, not sure what I could do if anything to help. My wife suggested I start some kind of "Angel network" for lung cancer victims and part of the deal is the mason jars with honey…I reminded her that I could go to jail for a long time for doing this. Just because something is morally right doesn't mean the judicial system is gonna weigh in on your side.
I don't want to lose my friend, not one that has helped me so much and yet I know it's part of the deal. Everything in my life anyways has a price attached. Sometimes that price is painful and literally feels like a pound of flesh, sometimes two.
Thanks for reading i-buds.
For the last few years I have reached out for help in the non traditional sense thru new age life coaches who are not armed with traditional doctorate degrees but one person in particular has done a lot of good for me. She helped me bridge the gap between my son and I, she helped me finish my degree at UM when I wanted to give up a couple times, she believed in me when others did not. She doesn't try to change who I am but always gets me to look at things from different perspectives.
If you follow my writing in here over the last 10+ years I think you can see some subtle changes in me, most people would even without a life coach, it's simply progressing thru life but I was a miserable person for a long time coming out of the recession and then of course other issues brought on by my own poor choices. Again she never judged me thankfully.
OK, so over the last year I have seen less and less of her because things have been rolling along pretty well. She has battled cancer in the last year but supposedly it was in remission. Well it's back in all it's glory and she is going to go thru chemo again, it's nasty. She has lung cancer and even though they prescribe powerful drugs she really needs the medicinal marijauna for serious reasons right now. Lung cancer patients have a big problem though, they can't smoke it.
To make things harder, she is 65 years old and really has no one her age to help her, no kids and no hubby. We live in Florida which at this moment is still completely marijuana-less even for medical purposes, all of it is illegal. Now she knows I smoke or have access to it rather easy so imagine the pain it must have caused her to call me, a client of hers no less who she has helped conquer NOT SMOKING at different points along the way over the last few years…she calls me for help. Help meaning she wants me to get her set up.
So of course I spring into action and we get a crock pot, 5 lbs of honey, and some herb and I go to her condo and start whipping this mixture up at her house. Honey n cannibas is not an exact science I gotta tell you but the recipes are out there for all on google. My life coach is usually dressed to the nines so this was a new experience with no wigs, hair that there is turned grey, house robes.
I'm kind of drained after all of this the last couple weeks. My wife has been beating me over the head to help her, and I am but I also am not the guy you want to lean on for everything in life. I was happy to help and quite frankly I don't know who else was gonna help her. She could have gotten help I guess if she asked enough folks but she came to me so I had to ask her why me?
Was it just she thought I was a pot junkie and could get it easy? She said not at all but that she felt she could trust me and that she learned as much from me in our sessions as I did from her. I asked her to explain a little further and she said I was the most combatant client she ever had in her 30 years of doing this, I said that doesn't sound good. She said I was the toughest because I questioned everything but also one of the most rewarding because of that.
She started chemo again and I packed up 12 mason jars of honey cooked for 8-12 hours with green rolled up in cheesecloth in the crock pot. She eats a few spoonfuls to deaden the pain. Her hair is starting to go again, it's awful watching it fall out in clumps so we decided to shave it off and go with ball caps and bandanas.
I don't talk to her the way I offer up some encouraging words in here at the FFA. We have real talks about what is likely to happen and we don't sugarcoat it. While we hope she pulls thru this we also talk about her work and all the good she has done the last 30 years making up for her time wasted to the bottle in her 20s and early 30s. I told her whatever crimes against humanity she thinks she committed when she was young that she has paid those debts 10x over and that her life was in no way wasted but rather impacted so many lives positively. She cried and told me no one ever told her that but then she smiled and I knew it was the right thing to say.
I told her if at any time she wants to stop the chemo and just run away somewhere nice and quiet to live out in dignity, I'm all there for her. But for now I am supporting the chemo and we hope it will work, she sure has more pain relief this time around for the chemo. She has no kids, no SO, her sister is a hot mess and not much help, she has an 85 year old father in New York who is not doing very well but she is hiding the cancer from him. I told her he knows whether she thinks so or not.
I'll be 40 in April kids, time flies by when you're having fun. I don't do much in life right, I've made a lot of bad choices but when I get the call which isn't all that often, but when I get the call I try hard to do what I am being called upon to do. I'm not much of a religious person, spiritual yes but religious not much. So when I say I answer the phone for God, I don't mean it the same way some of you would. I say God because I am lazy and cannot come up with a better explanation.
I bet other cancer victims are going thru similar things, lung cancer is not unique, not sure what I could do if anything to help. My wife suggested I start some kind of "Angel network" for lung cancer victims and part of the deal is the mason jars with honey…I reminded her that I could go to jail for a long time for doing this. Just because something is morally right doesn't mean the judicial system is gonna weigh in on your side.
I don't want to lose my friend, not one that has helped me so much and yet I know it's part of the deal. Everything in my life anyways has a price attached. Sometimes that price is painful and literally feels like a pound of flesh, sometimes two.
Thanks for reading i-buds.
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