Miss Cricket is feeling good. She’s been on the CBD oil for a few weeks now, two drops each morning on her chicken treat, and she is noticeably happier and more energetic. She’s playing with her toys more, and running and jumping more easily. Her body seems looser, and less tense. She’s still the biggest barker on the block, though, so it hasn’t changed her level of outrage with the world, but she’s cool with that.
“I am Cricket! I love to bark!”
On the other hand, after the first experiments with the CBD dog treats, I haven’t noticed much improvement in myself from taking daily doses of CBD oil. It’s possible that I’d be in more pain without it, but I’m not sure. And the taste of the oil is really starting to bother me.
I started the CBD experiment after it became clear that I was failing out of physical therapy. I’d spent four months going to sessions twice a week for my neck and shoulder, and religiously doing my home exercises every day, but sometime in December it became clear that I was losing energy instead of gaining strength. We tried lowering the intensity and duration of my workouts, but the physical therapist noticed that I was struggling to keep my head up after the first five or ten minutes of exercises, and then my walking was bad by the end of each session, and she finally told me to take a break, preferably a long break, until my doctor could get a handle on what the heck was going on with me.
And then the CBD idea came up, and I hoped that CBD oil might be the missing link allowing me to tolerate more exercise and build more stability and strength, but it hasn’t worked, at least not yet. I still do an abbreviated version of my exercise routine, depending on how the pain is going each day, but it exhausts me every time.
“Ten naps a day, Mommy. That’s the answer.”
I’m still taking a dose of CBD oil, morning and evening, because I spent a lot of money on it, but I’m losing faith that it will eventually kick in. I have to go back to my primary care doctor and see what she thinks I should do next, whether it’s further evaluation, or a prescription for medical marijuana, or something else, or nothing. But there has to be some way for me to function like a semi-normal human being.
“What’s normal?”
What I really want is to find out that brownies and Godiva chocolates are the answer to all of my ills, and if I eat enough of them I will have plenty of energy and never gain weight. That really should be true.
Cricket is convinced that the chocolate-is-bad-for-dogs thing is a horrible lie cooked up by the same chocolate-hoarding-humans who tell me that I need to limit my intake of chocolate per day for my own well-being. She thinks that we should be on the same side of this fight, and make chicken/chocolate/cheese sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I tend to disagree, but I could be wrong.
“You’re wrong. Very wrong.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Amazon page and consider ordering the Kindle or Paperback version (or both!) of Yeshiva Girl. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon or elsewhere, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish girl on Long Island named Izzy (short for Isabel). Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes that it’s true. Izzy’s father decides to send her to an Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, as if she’s the one who needs to be fixed. Izzy, in pain, smart, funny, and looking for people she can trust, finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment.
rachelmankowitz 