Piling wrote:I did not "give up" sugar, I don't eat it usually.
I should find a paper "what's happen when you become a pesco-vegan for Lent'
It's PIG DAY ! I can't even celebrate it with a good sausage
Piling wrote:Today some Kurds told me that olive oil is good for flu and cough. I am doubtful. I will believe it only if Kurds from Afrin confirm. Behdinani know nothing about olives culture.
Piling wrote:It is waffle Day… pour people who don't observe Fasting
Piling wrote:If I lost 15 kg I'll have such days
I gave my little boy CANNABIS to help cure his cancer:
Mother reveals how her teenage son who was given days to live made a miracle recovery when she gave him the drug behind his doctors' backs
Deryn Blackwell had been diagnosed with two forms of cancer
He was in severe pain and had become addicted to morphine
In 2013 the boy, then aged 14, was moved to a hospice and expected to die
His parents decided to give him cannabis to ease the pain
Since taking the drug, Deryn, now 17, has made a miracle recovery
His mother, Callie Blackwell, has revealed his astounding story in a new book
The pain was getting worse. The tips of my son Deryn’s fingers were hard and black from a superbug infection. His nails were peeling away and any remaining live flesh was covered in weeping sores.
Every day, he begged me: ‘Please tell them to cut my hand off, Mum. I can’t take this any more.’
Deryn was nauseous and, worse, had become addicted to his anti-sickness drugs. He was allowed a dose every seven to eight hours but within an hour of being given some, he would press the buzzer to call the nurses back in.
‘When can I have my cyclizine?’ he would ask. ‘It’s the only thing that helps with the pain. It makes me feel safe. It doesn’t hurt for a little while, just long enough to forget about it. Then it all comes back again.’
If he was told to wait, Deryn would get angry and aggressive, like someone hooked on heroin. I had known drug addicts and, just weeks short of his 14th birthday, my son was ticking all the same boxes.
We couldn’t sit by and watch him spend his last days in a morphine fog. Enough was enough. So I went into the city and purchased a vaporiser pen – specialist equipment for inhaling an illegal drug…
Deryn had suffered enough. In 2010, when he was just ten years old, he had been diagnosed with leukaemia.
Eighteen months later, he was told he had a secondary cancer, the extremely rare Langerhans cell sarcoma. Only 50 cases have ever been recorded and only five people in the world currently have it. But no one had ever been found to have the two cancers combined, making Deryn unique. One boy in seven billion people.
By 2013, after nearly four years of hospital treatment, it seemed that the only thing left for him were opiate drugs to ease the pain as he reached the end of his life.
Like any mother would be, I was desperate to find something to alleviate his suffering.
I spent hour after hour researching on the internet, and that’s where I came across reports of a substance called Bedrocan, a cannabis-based painkiller that wasn’t available in the UK. Surely Bedrocan had to be a better option than mind-numbing morphine?
But the doctor told me that while it was effective, it had not been tested on children and she couldn’t prescribe it.
And so we took a decision that will horrify many parents reading this – and horrified me, too.
After all, I’d never seen anything positive come of smoking cannabis, and in my days working in nightclubs, illegal drugs had been my enemy. But if it could help my darling boy escape his daily torment, I was willing to try it.
Now we had to find some cannabis and then work out how to make the liquid that could ease Deryn’s pain.
Simon, my husband, arranged to meet someone at a nearby service station to collect some. The whole experience was frightening.
Cannabis was a class B drug, which carried a sentence of up to five years’ imprisonment for possession, and up to 14 years for supplying to another person.
We had seen news reports on TV about parents who had had their children taken away from them after trying alternatives such as cannabis. I hadn’t forgotten one doctor’s words to me about my child being made a ward of court if we went against traditional treatment methods.
If either of us were to get into trouble over this, Simon wanted it to be him. And he took responsibility for the operation. He wasn’t going to allow anyone to take me away from the children just for alleviating Deryn’s suffering.
Back at the hospital, meanwhile, our son’s latest bone marrow transplant had failed. Staff were giving up on him. It seemed Deryn’s death was a done deal and now all we could do was wait until he drew his final breath. If there was no improvement in two weeks, he would be placed in palliative care.
If ever I needed a sign to get a grip on myself, this was it. I had to remain positive, no matter what the doctors were telling me.
After further research, I discovered we needed to buy a rice cooker and vegetable glycerine to make the ‘tincture’ suitable for the vaporiser pen. The house stank to the heavens as Simon experimented with the infusion.
Deryn, of course, was excited to be trying it with the blessing of his mum and dad, but I felt anxious at the prospect of my son’s underage and illegal drug use, especially as we were in hospital.
After drawing the curtains so that no one could see through the window, Simon handed the filled pen over to Deryn. We felt like naughty schoolkids who were having a sneaky cigarette around the back of the bike sheds.
Deryn sucked on the pen, breathed in and blew out a massive cloud of vapour – and we frantically waved our hands around trying to disperse it, although there wasn’t the smell of cannabis. It smelt more like popcorn. After ten minutes, Deryn said that the pain had decreased a little and he felt more relaxed – the words we had been longing to hear.
Alas, his condition continued to worsen. By December 2013, Deryn had moved out of hospital and into a hospice, where he planned his own funeral. His bravery attracted national attention and some of his favourite celebrities, including Paul Hollywood, Pauline Quirk and Linda Robson came to meet him.
Deryn was actually looking forward to dying and considered it his next adventure. But one night, he woke up in the early hours of the morning, sobbing. After staying so strong for so long, he was begging for me to end it all.
‘I don’t want any more morphine, Mum. It makes me feel like I’m not here,’ he cried.
I was sitting next to him, a nightly vigil, and held his hand. Once again, the situation seemed quite desperate. What would happen, I wondered, if I gave Deryn a small amount of golden cannabis tincture directly in his mouth? The vaporiser had brought him some relief but could a higher dose have better results?
I took a small, empty syringe from the medicine cupboard in the hospice and quickly checked that there was no one outside. It was New Year’s Eve so staff levels were minimal. I drew up 5ml of the honey-like substance, which had a sweet, floral flavour.
Still sobbing uncontrollably, Deryn opened his mouth and I popped the syringe underneath his tongue. Deryn held it for a minute before swallowing. Half an hour passed. He was no longer having a panic attack. He looked peaceful. I asked him how he was feeling.
‘I feel relaxed,’ he told me. ‘I’m aware of everything. I just feel at peace, Mum. It’s beautiful.’
Moments later, the nurse came back in with his dose of cyclizine, the powerful anti-sickness drug to which Deryn had grown addicted.
I panicked. There was no way he would turn that drug away and I was worried about the effect the cannabis tincture could have on it. Then I heard Deryn tell the nurse he didn’t want it. She was flabbergasted. Everyone knew how much he relied on it to help him.
‘I don’t feel like I need it any more, thanks,’ he said, before rolling over and going to sleep.
Over the coming days, my priority was allowing him to die with his faculties intact, so whenever Deryn felt a twinge somewhere, I would put another 5ml of the tincture underneath his tongue and, within a few minutes, he felt good again.
Deryn’s mouth, fingers, stomach, gums, tongue, hips, knees, legs and back had been constantly painful for as long as I could remember, so this was nothing short of fantastic.
One evening, I heard Deryn yell: ‘Mum – look!’ The bandage on his middle finger had worked its way loose and completely come off, showing his third finger – which had been blackened and dead – had now healed. How on earth had a child with no immune system and no way of fighting infection managed to heal himself after being off medication for more than three weeks?
I called Deryn’s team to tell them what had happened. Not one of them could give me any answers.
We knew his bone marrow wasn’t functioning and it was not scientifically possible for his wounds to heal. Deryn had spent months in isolation because a common cold could be fatal – yet, somehow, he had overcome three catastrophic infections.
Hundreds of people had been praying for Deryn, blessing him in their own ways. Was this a miracle?
Later that evening, the hospice doctor arrived. ‘We’re no longer sure Deryn is dying,’ she admitted.
The doctors were not sure whether or not the hospice was now the best place for us.
When we’d arrived four weeks earlier, he’d been given three days to live. Now here he was a month later, in far better health than when he’d left his hospital room. They had no idea how this was possible.
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