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"Marijuana and My Mom"
Andrea Chamney


I'm Andrea Chamney. I'm MaryLynne Chamney's daughter, who's a medical marijuana exemptee. Thank you for having me. I'm just going to tell my story and how marijuana has affected me, directly and indirectly.

I was 10 years old when my mom first got sick. She had her first seizure then she started having more. At first we thought it was related to stress, then we found out it was epilepsy.

For those of you who think that siezures are the only symptom of epilepsy, you're incorrect. Because the medications she was put on to control the seizures turned ther into a completely different person. She was weak, had double vision, lost her appetite, and therefore lost a lot of weight. She only weighed about 70 pounds, and she still is very tiny. And so yo could say that mother and daughter rolls were reversed - I was taking care of her. I think not a lot of 10 year olds know what [epilepsy drugs do], I was pretty good at pharmacology back then.

All of a sudden my mom started getting better, meaning her side effects tapered off and all of a sudden her grand mal seizures started to decrease and this was all due to a misunderstood plant - marijuana.

All I knew was that my mom was mom again and that my parents were open with me from the beginning and I was better for it.

If I backtrack a bit, my mother couldn't get disability compensation, actually the government wouldn't give it to her. My mom was unable to work and believe me she tried. So my dad worked and a lot of the money [went] to her special medicine. But after a 2 year fight, Mom got a medical marijuana exemption. She was allowed to possess it, smoke it and even grow it.

We were happy because mom was no longer a criminal for making herself feel better. Even so, my parents had to comb through the streets looking for medicine from people we wouldn't associate ourselves with.

So we finally attempted to grow ourselves to guarantee a clean supply and save a bit of money by not having to buy it. Growing went great, Mom would have a constant supply of meds but soon near harvest time something totally unexpected happened that changed our lives forever.

On May 14, 3:30AM, 4 thugs with ski masks on, armed with guns and knives, forced their way in through a window in my house. They stuck a gun in my face as well as my grantparents', punched my epileptic mother in the face and left us screaming in the streets. Thanks to my dad waking up, we did scare them off, but interfering with their plans of tying us up with the duct tape they forgot in the bag with the razor blades. They didn't take anything but they might as well have because the plants were so heavily stomped on from the men jumping through the window that they were unfit for consumption. That lefr us where we started, going to the black market for my mom's medication.

Since that night my mom has had 4 root canals because of the punch. And my dad took on a second job. He works from 3:30AM to 9 o'clock PM. And my grandparents moved 6 hours away. Everything that happened that night had a chain reaction. I still have nightmares. When I wake up at night, I'm too scared to go back to sleep. I leave at 5:30AM to take the bus to school to become a nurse. And I'm scared someone's waiting for me beside the house where they came in. So im glad its getting lighter outside anyway.

It's not fair that in my own country I should feel this way, day in and day out. When a Canadian citizen get s sick, the family suffers too. They diagnosed me as having nervous shock. But what health canada has done to my family has literally shattered my soul.

The point I'm getting at is that family comes first and I would go through all of it again 10 times worse if it would make my mom completely better, but in the meantime marijuana does help her live a healthy live.

And in conclusion, the past ten years with my famliy shouldn't have been the way it was for us, if my mom was able to receive a regulated, clean supply of marijuana from the government from the beginning. After all ifts just a plant that god put here for a purpose.