(This reallly opened my eyes as to how the "authorities" see marijuana - also really mainstream community. Jesus Chris man its just a plant man put down your weapons and step away!)
MS Debacle

So on the 20th of May 2008, I went to the emergency room and walked in. The front of my thighs, especially my right thigh, and my lower back and hips were on fire with pain, as if from the inside out, a pain that I had never felt for my 48 years. It freaked me out. I did not tell the doctor about my getting high a couple nights earlier on marijuana for what to me are obvious reasons. I did not know that it was protocol to administer a drug screening. Well, this doctor is a marijuana hater, no doubt. He accused me of lying about it trying to scam them for narcotics. Finally after hours of waiting on a gurney in a curtained off holding tank, my wife went to speak with the doctor to find out what was going on. The doctor wheeled around grinding his jaw in anger and said, “I’m signing your husband’s discharge papers, he’s faking and out of here.”
My wife was kind of freaked out by his anger but my wife is a strong woman, a strong advocate. She pointed at the doctors discharge papers and said that if anything happened to me, she would be requesting that paperwork for trial, and this lonly led to many hours of more of tests. At this point I could use my legs but just had the nerve pain, a deep burning pain. It was getting harder and harder for me to walk. I went home finally and had a pain killer proscribed by the pot hater doctor and slept very much hoping to awake with the whole thing resolved. Maybe all I needed was a good nights sleep?

May 21 (our wedding anniversary)

By the next day I was throwing up green bile and getting weaker and weaker as the morning went on. The pain stopped replaced by numbness and more a loss of power, and worst of all, I could not pee. When I realized that I could no longer move my legs, I told Jana’ to call an ambulance. I knew in my heart then that it was MS related somehow because of a previous attack of optic neuritis (in this case taking the form of blindness in my left eye) and I was pretty freaked out. I could almost feel the pain stopping and the numb paralysis creeping into my legs. Whatever it was, it came on fast, taking me down literally in two days, it seemed. On this visit the emergency room doctor was professional but baffled by my symptoms, as were the neurologists later with all their more sophisticated tests. But a nurse there was nurse Ratchet and accused me of faking my symptoms to get, guess what, pain killers … I tried to interrupt Nurse Ratchet and hip her to the fact that I was having no pain any longer, just no power, so I had no need for pain medicine any longer, anyway.
What I needed was to empty my bladder. I had to pee so bad it hurt but could not, as if that was as dead as my legs. When the nurse finally put a catheter in me, I pissed a thousand CC right off and the relief was incredible.

At one point when transferring to an x ray table, Nurse Ratchet dropped my legs, calling me a faker out loud and walking out of the room, leaving me grabbing at the metal x ray table with my arms (I still had use of my arms are this point) The x ray technician seemed appropriately appalled and as I sprawled with no power in my legs at all, he helped me get a hand over the far edge of the table and grabbed my legs to help me get on the table. I’m not faking anything, I insisted. That Nurse is nuts. I think he understood. Later, in the Lubbock Covenant Hospital, I found out that I have blood clots behind each knee. The nurse literally could have killed me dropping my legs like that, breaking loose a blood clot that causes a stroke or fatal heart attack.
What I do not understand most of all is that even if someone does come in scamming for drugs, that individual is an addict and needs to be treated by the medical community most of all, as individuals in need of medical intervention not incarceration or even this kind of judgment. This was really an eye opener to me, not to mention makes we not want to call 911 or go back to that ER - if I were paralyzed, Nurse Ratchet could kill me easily enough.

Finally, my family doctor intervenes and gets me transferred to the closest hospital with a neurologist which happened to be either in Albuquerque, NM or Lubbock, TX. This involved a four plus hour ambulance ride from Ruidoso to Lubbock, TX. Even on the neuroward in ICU the doctors had no clue reliant on two spinal taps and numerous MRI’s and then are still guessing really by process of elimination that I have ADEM (acute dissimilated encephalitis) Because I had another case of nerve damage in the form of optic neuritis four years ago, in the case of MS it’s two and you are out and this made two cases of nerve damage, my own immune system attacking the nerve sheaf, like a plug wire to your car with a hole in it, or the plastic wire cover surrounding a light cord worn away in one spot shorting out the appliance.
At one point I was completely paralyzed from head to toe, stiff as a board, muscles constantly shaking, sweating like a pig. The neurologist was straight with my wife telling her that I might not make it. My wife and I had spoken about such an eventuality previously and both agreed that if even presented with such a situation, we would want to know. So she told me, crying. My wife never cries - I cry all the time, at movies, all the time. Anyway, that really made it sink in. It was more like the doctor didn’t think that I was going to make it and clearly my wife had her doubts. I felt no fear at all, I noticed. I told my wife not to worry, death was like walking from one room into another, and all our finances, such as they were, were in order. Inside I gave in, gave up, let go … I didn’t feel any urge to struggle or fight for my life or anything like that. I just thought, “what will be will be” and gave myself to death, same as I had before with the mushrooms. I have done this before, I thought to myself.
I was in ICU over two weeks and the intravenous steroids saved my life and enabled me to walk but they make me ravenously hunger, temporarily diabetic, and a little nuts - it’s exactly like eating speed. At hospital I could only sleep two to four hours a night no matter what they tried to knock me out with. I have to come down off of the steroids very slowly but am still on max dosage. After getting off of ICU where the nurses have like two patients and stand just a few feet from your bed like guardian angels, going to a “ward” was like being warehoused. It took three days for paperwork to clear for me to get down to the covenant rehab unit. All this while my wife had stood by me, sleeping even in ICU on chair with her head on my railing. Now I had a private room and she had her own cot, not that it was very comfortable. The rehab doctor was very good and estimated that I would be there one month and I told him max two weeks and got out after two weeks exactly on rehab, which was last Friday, the 20th of June, and the summer solstice.
I am so grateful to be home - my ambition has been much reduced. Just to be able to walk around the house, even with my walker, is great - being able to get to the bathroom on my own is an achievement. Watching the raven soar above the village below us. Everyone that comes here comments on the view, often calling it a million dollar view. Man it beats all hell out of a hospital room.