Brave New Weed by Joe Dolce

Author:Joe Dolce
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

Simpson doesn’t sell oils and he gives the formula away for free. His goal, he says, is not profit but to spread the cannabis oil gospel to anyone who’ll listen. No one knows if it works consistently or on what types of cancers, but thousands of people have sworn that it does. What is known is that squaring off with fatal diseases, especially with unproven, unregulated plant medicines of varying strengths and qualities, is risky. It’s especially fraught in an unregulated environment where there is no way to discern the quacks from the healers, as many voyagers into the new world of cannabis have discovered. Angela Ryder is one of them.

Around Thanksgiving 2012, Angela’s ten-year-old son, Chico, came tearing out of the bathroom, excited about the alien growth in his throat. “Hey, Mom, look at this!” he said, opening his mouth to show her his engorged tonsil. He thought it was kind of cool. When Chico left, her husband, Paul Ryder (bass player of the English alt rock band Happy Mondays), turned to her and mouthed, “Cancer!” Angela rolled her eyes—Paul is a notorious hypochondriac. A virus had been snaking its way through the household, so it stood to reason that their youngest son was next in line.

Two weeks later, Angela spotted a lump protruding from the side of Chico’s neck. It looked like a swollen gland, so they visited a nurse practitioner at the local CVS pharmacy. “You don’t think it could be a tumor, do you?” Angela asked the nurse.

“Oh no.”

“How can you be certain?”

“I’ve studied medicine. These antibiotics should do the trick . . .”

Five days later, the lump on Chico’s neck had ballooned to the size of a bonbon, so they headed to the doctor, who prescribed a different antibiotic. But it’s odd, he said, a throat infection doesn’t typically appear on only one side of the throat—both sides are normally swollen. Let’s run a test for mono.

“Good news!” the doctor’s assistant said when she called in the results a few days later. “It’s not mono!” But Angela was not relieved. Chico was now puking uncontrollably and his heart was racing. Something was very wrong. Next stop: a head and neck specialist who biopsied the tonsil for lymphoma.

When those tests came back negative the specialist was at a loss. We don’t typically see tumors in the mouths of children, he said. People who smoke and drink, yes, but not in a child.

On December 20, Chico was still throwing up. He couldn’t eat. Angela took him to another specialist, who took one look at the scan and called an oncologist stat. “Christ!” she said. “They biopsied the wrong tissue.” There was a tumor hidden behind the tonsil, pushing it forward. The oncologist told Angela that the hidden tumor was so large it was constricting Chico’s carotid artery, which was making his heart rate go haywire.

Eventually they identified the tumor as “rhabdo” (rhabdomyosarcoma), a malignancy of the soft tissue that affects just three hundred kids in the United States each year.

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