Meet Nikki Narduzzi of Staunton, VA…
“It is the middle of winter. For three months, she lay in a twin bed shoved in the corner of a windowless, dark room in her mother’s house. French doors leading out to a sunroom are covered in heavy curtains. Heavily medicated and consumed by pain after surviving her eighth surgery from Crohn’s disease, she lay there in and out of consciousness. The world outside the room does not exist.
Cluttered on the bed’s nightstand are items for wound care and a myriad of prescription drugs: fentanyl patches, oxycodone, methadone, anxiety and sleep meds, steroids, gauze, q-tips, saline solution, and a bottle of ginger ale. In a bag on the floor is a supply of bed coverings to avoid soiling the sheets.
For pain, Narduzzi is prescribed 75mg fentanyl patches every three days, 30mg oxycodone every eight hours and methadone every 12 hours. None of it touches the pain.
Her ideal weight, 140, has ballooned to 200 pounds from long-term steroid use.
She is in too much pain to watch television or read. When the pain gets acute, she lies on her stomach and buries her head in the pillow muffling her screams. She doesn’t like the light. Psychologically, staying in the dark helps her to block out the thoughts of all the things she is missing in life.
The tears begin to fall and her voice starts quivering as she remembers.
‘Mentally and emotionally to deal with what I was going through physically, I had to flip a switch. Shut my brain off. My whole world was in that room. I had no idea what the outside looked like, felt like. All I knew is the people I loved were out there, and I couldn’t get out there to be with them so I had to flip that switch.’
A nurse comes twice a week to change her bandages; an excruciatingly painful procedure that takes 30 minutes. Bedridden, her quality of life consists of sleeping, pain management and daily assistance from family members and healthcare providers.
‘It’s hard for me to relive it. At some point you start to wonder – Am I ever going to get better? And if not, do I want to continue to live like this? Even with that amount of suffering, I said no to medical marijuana because of the stigma attached to it’.”
And then, after her long fall, Nikki began a journey back into life with the assistance of medicinal cannabis, which has not only changed her life, it has her out in the world changing other people’s….
….click for the rest of the story of another point of light…
TRUCE note: A few case stories are “anecdotal evidence” which opponents like to dismiss, but the accumulation of tens to hundreds of thousands or more of similar success stories across the world and over centuries, well, that… ….that is known as clinical evidence….
#MMJ #EndPainNotLives #Story #VApol #UTpol #UtahNext #TRUCE
See full article – Pain over politics: How this Staunton Republican became an advocate for medical marijuana
