Using Cannabis in the Hospital After Surviving a Heart Attack

Bradley: Sure, so I’m Bradley McQuiddy. I’m from the Texas panhandle. I’m 63 years old, and on December 21st, I had a heart attack. I’ve been a cannabis user for my whole life. I was in the hospital recovering from open heart surgery, and I was really nauseous; it was really sick. One of my nurses noticed I had long hair and a beard, I guess. And she was like, “By chance have you used cannabis?” And my wife goes, “Pretty much every day since 1970 something, yeah.”

They said, “Do you have your card?” And we said, “Yes”. And she goes, “Would you if the doctor says yes, you can use your cannabis in the hospital.” It’s been on their books since 2019. I’m the second patient in all those years to use cannabis. Nobody’s used it, but you have to ask your doctor, and your doctor has to give you permission. You can’t vape or smoke, but creams, tinctures, lotions, edibles, and all that stuff work great.

Bradley: I was having real problems with nausea, and after I’d had surgery, reactions from the anesthetic. The whole day I’d had six crackers. That’s when the nurse said, “Do you use cannabis? Yeah, would you like to here?” Like, yeah, so my wife went to the dispensary and told them what was going on. There’s a company called Bison and Rose, which was actually started by doctors. They have a nerve cream that we used. I believe they made the FECO tincture that we used. And they definitely made an under-the-tongue sublingual called rest that I used to help me sleep.

Emily: Oh my gosh, to be able to use this in the hospital without sneaking, it has to be the best feeling. I can’t believe you had such open-minded professionals there. I’m so impressed.

Bradley: And it was a nurse in the CCU that brought it up. And the doctor was like, “Yeah, we don’t have anything that’s going to treat pain or nausea like the cannabis will if you’re used to using it. As long as it’s legal, you’re good to go.”

Emily: I mean, it’s such an encouragement. All right, Bradley, tell me a little bit, you’re in Oklahoma, and a lot of times, people have this misconception that the South is fairly anti-cannabis, but it sounds like you’ve had a really great experience with the medical system. How has that worked out for you?

Bradley: It worked out surprisingly well, and I’m new to Oklahoma in that we moved here last June from Colorado. We were looking for someplace with legal cannabis. We’d moved to Colorado from Texas to take advantage of legal cannabis. We found it very crowded and very expensive in Colorado. We were dismayed by the state of the cannabis market compared to what we could get in Oklahoma.

Bradley: When my wife went to the dispensary and told him I was having problems with nausea, they said, get this FECO tincture. It’s a FECO oil, but it’s in a tincture, so it’s more liquid. And six people turned around at once, the customers and the budtenders, everybody in that dispensary turned around at once and said, put it in his belly button.

Emily: Oh, okay. I’ve heard of that. How did that work for you?

Bradley: You know, it’s an old thing, and it worked great. We didn’t; I’d never heard of it before and never tried it. And it’s a trick we’ll use for the rest of our lives. What a great method of putting it in the body.

Emily: When you brought it up to your doctor, were you nervous? And how did your doctor react?

Bradley: No, my nurse brought it up to my doctor. My nurse brought it up to my doctor and to me. It was the nurse and the doctor’s like, “Yeah if he’s got his card.” It didn’t take him five minutes to decide. And within, I’d say, 20 minutes of when they originally asked us, we had a security guard there with a lock box for us to use it. It was amazing. It came all from them. We never asked; it wasn’t from us at all. So we didn’t talk about it. I’m from the panhandle of Texas. I’m from Hemp Hill; I’m from Hemp Hill County. I was born in Hemphill County at 4:20 in the morning.

Emily: Absolutely. Now do you know, are they incorporating cannabis? You said you were the second person ever to use cannabis in the hospital. Are they becoming more friendly with that, or how is that progressing?

Bradley: I think so. I think one of the things that’s come out of this is I had a really severe heart attack and had open heart surgery. I had a quintuple bypass. And I think my life’s definitely changing, and I think I’m going to do education. One of the things I’m going to do is do some education with seniors and with other people about the advantages of cannabis and how you can incorporate it into your traditional healthcare.

Emily: I feel like our senior population could find the most benefit from cannabis to hear that you want to provide that education. I feel like that’s the missing piece is just the education. And if they had that, they would feel more comfortable being able to say, you know, I think I’m going to give this a try.

Bradley: If we can teach them about RSO and about FECO and about where the medicine really lives. We’re not just spraying gummies with distillate to get high. We’re actually using the full-spectrum whole plant, the entourage effect. And we’re taking the medicine to people.

Emily: I mean, I just imagine what our world would look like if someone like you could come into a hospital and to say to someone in pain, I have a different option if you want to try it and provide a little bit of background information. I just can’t imagine not only how much better people would feel but how much less reliant people would be on other medications that could make them sicker. So, I mean, this is just the future of what you’re doing.

Bradley: Absolutely. No, if you look at the states where they’ve legalized medical cannabis, the number of opioids that are consumed by that state, I believe, has all gone down.

Emily: When we think about the opioid crisis and how it affects people and how terrible and devastating it is, we have a somewhat viable solution, especially for pain that is not addictive and does not have the side effects. Just as we get deeper and deeper into the opioid crisis, I don’t know why people aren’t shouting from the rooftops more that there is a safer alternative out there.

Bradley: It wasn’t me, the old stoner going, “Hey, can I use my grass in the hospital?” It was the hospital going, “Hey, do you have your medical card? Because if you do, there are things that’ll help you better than what we have here.”

Emily: If every nurse could do that or if every nurse felt comfortable enough or that they would be supported by their own healthcare team and their own practice, that would be just even a suggestion. I’m sure it made all the difference in your recovery as well.

Bradley: It made a huge difference. I put the pain medicine down like we were talking about a minute ago; I quit using morphine as soon as I got the cannabis and went to Tramadol and only had tramadol for a couple of days. And it was like, “No, I don’t need or want this anymore. I’ll just use the cannabis, thanks.” And I think I’ve had one tramadol since I got home. And that’s it.

Emily: It is so nice. I always want to tell people I’m not anti-pharma; it is nice to have tramadol as you need it, but to be able to say, “Okay, I can walk away from it.” That is a beautiful thing.

Bradley: Absolutely. And you know, no, and I’m not anti-western medicine, I just think that there are less harsh alternatives that don’t have the side effects.

Emily: Absolutely. Especially for people who are sick who are in the hospital, they need fewer side effects because very quickly it can turn into one condition on top of another, on top of another. That’s kind of where our senior population, a lot of people are now, is they don’t even know how to get out of it at this point because they’re on so many medications and they’re terrified. If they had your guiding hand, you and your wife to come in and say, “Let us help you,” would be such a service to the world.

Emily: That is terrible. I’m sure that this is happening across the country, but that is really so sad when you think about it probably happens way more than we want to know.

Bradley: It happens because they’re stacking the medications, and they’re on so many different prescriptions, and then they don’t feel good. They don’t feel right.

Emily: Oh my gosh. I feel like we’re on the cusp of a revolution, really. I feel like what you are doing is so meaningful. I’m from the younger generation; a lot of us are like, “We know about weed; we can go find information.” But our senior population spent their whole lives being told that cannabis is bad, and it’s really hard to overcome those thoughts. To have someone, a guiding hand, to be like, “Let me help you and show you the way,” would just be such a benefit for so many people.

Bradley: You know, you walk into a dispensary now, and hell, I’m overwhelmed, and I know what this stuff is.

Emily: Yes, there are. Oklahoma’s dispensaries sound way better than New York’s dispensaries. I feel like I would be overwhelmed, too, with all of those amazing selections. Even going to the dispensary for the first time causes a lot of anxiety for people. Imagine if you had a trusted friend or resource that could take you and be like, let’s go together. How comforting would that be for people?

Bradley: In Oklahoma, they even have a thing where if you want to be a caregiver for elder care, people can get their cards and assign you as their caregiver, and you can go to the dispensary for them.

Emily: That is so helpful and nice. Think about how many people can’t actually even go to the dispensary.

Bradley: Exactly. It was the show on CNN with Sanjay Gupta. They talked to some doctors in Scandinavia that were using cannabis with dementia patients and having really, really good, good luck with it.

Emily: Oh my gosh. Imagine how many people. I don’t know if you see the news stories that they say, “we’re going to see a rise in dementia in the next couple of years.” Wow. What if we had like an viable option to try? It would make such a difference in the quality of people’s lives.

Bradley: Yeah, I’ve seen it work, and it’s really calming. And it makes them less scared.

Emily: Doesn’t everyone deserve that, too? If whoever’s listening on the other end, maybe it’s your mom and you’re struggling or your dad with dementia, and if you’re listening to this and thinking, “wow, if there’s something that could make them calm and comfortable” what a gift. You should absolutely give it a try, even if you know you’ve never done it before. Just once. Just to see if it helps.

Bradley: But be careful and be gentle. Just don’t start with a 25-milligram gummy; find the medicine. Use a tincture, use something that’s sublingual, and put it in the food. There are so many ways you can do this that are not intrusive, that aren’t scary, and that we’re not going to freak them out.

Emily: Absolutely that’s the number one goal. It’s unfortunate that we just don’t have this basic education given to us. We learned from friends and family how to moderate alcohol and use it responsibly, but no one’s there to tell us that about cannabis. If we just had that basic information of, like starting low with a very low dose, and being willing to experiment and be patient, I feel like people would be in such a better space.

As you said, if you start too high, you’re going to make them feel sick or unwell, and that will completely freak them out. They’ll never want to try cannabis again, even if it could help them. So that is a great point, is just knowing where to start and how to be careful doing that. I have found this when working just with elderly folks that, especially the older they get, like the lower dose you need to start with, I’m talking like one milligram, especially like really teeny, tiny, frail people. Have you had the same experience?

Bradley: The microdosing? Absolutely microdosing. One of the things that came to me in the dispensary through a friend that’s a budtender, I got some five-milligram candies that were a hard candies I could just suck on. And those things really helped a lot.

Emily: I bet. ‘You get a little bit of that sublingual, and then you get that edible effect too. That’s perfect for an older individual too because it’s not too in your face, you know, they’re used to something like that.

Bradley: That’s exactly right. No, and when I start somebody on RSO, we’re talking about, you know, a grain of rice or half a grain of rice. Be slow and gentle.

Emily: Yes, and have you found, I feel like I’m always reiterating this, but I really want people to understand that it takes a few different times to try cannabis. In different doses, and different application methods to really find what’s going to work for you. I find a lot of people are like, “give me the solution, the one-and-done pill.” But with cannabis, it’s not really like that.

Bradley: That’s right. No, every person has to find kind of the way it titrates for them and how they want to take it and how much they want to take and how they want to feel. We got a friend’s mom, we all grew up smoking pot, and we were in trouble. One of my friend’s mom finally said, “Well, you know, why is this illegal? This is stupid.” And it’s like, you know, I’ve waited my whole life to hear those words from you.

As I said, and you can’t take that that pain stick to the church tell them about it, because we’re still in Texas, and it’s a felony for you and a felony for me. We can’t do that. But having somebody that’s gone from, “Well, this is the devil’s lettuce, and everybody’s going to hell” to, “well, this shouldn’t be illegal, and my knee feels wonderful.” Then she’s taking gummies to sleep. “How are you liking the gummies to sleep? Well, I sleep really well. I’m happy.”

Emily: That’s a big thing for elderly folks, as well, sleep. Without good quality sleep, you can’t function in your day in any type of way. For a lot of people, they don’t want to be high. You don’t have to be high. You can use cannabis to fall asleep and stay asleep and wake up in the morning and be totally fine.

Bradley: Most of the sleep aids now have THC for full-spectrum, but they’re not high THC, and they’re using more CBN and the other terpenes that will encourage sleep. The cannabinoids.

Emily: Exactly. I find so many people are afraid of the high and don’t realize that there are so many products out there that are designed to use that won’t make you super high. There’s a huge part of the population who is here for the wellness aspect, not the high aspect. I’m sure when you go into dispensaries; you see those products. They’re intended for wellness, not just for getting high. And I think people really need to hear that as we move forward and get more people in the door.

Bradley: I agree; it’s the medicine of the plant. It’s the whole plant. It’s the full spectrum. It’s using everything. We’re not just spraying a gummy with distillate where we’ve taken it apart. My son who’s 41 and grew up in a cannabis-friendly household. So we didn’t legalize THC. We’ve commercialized cannabis.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. One of my biggest goals is to get people to feel confident and self-sufficient enough to be able to grow a plant of their own so that they’re not reliant on the system. Have you had the experience of growing at all in Oklahoma?

Bradley: Not in Oklahoma. I got caught growing in New Mexico a little ahead of the game, and it was very expensive. It was embarrassing, and I found out I don’t look good in orange; I got arrested. I’m now a felon because I was growing my own medical marijuana. The DEA even stood up at my arraignment and said, “He wasn’t selling it, your Honor; please take distribution out of the charges.” It was a border state charge, and manufacturing and distribution went together, and the DEA actually had to remove distribution from my charges. I was a medical user and had gotten all happy growing it; I had a traumatic brain injury from a ski accident. I hit a tree snow skiing going between 35 and 40mph, and then fell 35 feet off the mountain.

Emily: Oh no.

Bradley: I lived. Spent a week in ICU, and after 10 days in there, I go back to my doctor after being home for 10 days and said, “Look, the current dose of Percocets is just making me sick now.” I went to college in the seventies; we either have to take more or we have to put the stuff away with the current dose is now just irritating me and making me sick. He goes, “Well, I’ll give you another script of Percocet, and you have a week to get off of it, and if you don’t get off of it, I’m going to put you on methadone and don’t go cold turkey.” And he goes, “And you tested positive for cannabis in the ER; use it for pain.” And he sent me home, and I went, didn’t feel the Percocet anymore at all. My son made some brownies for me. And we started with cannabis.

Bradley: Oh, I totally agree. You know, cannabis has been used for five, 6,000 years with not one single death, nothing. Nobody’s died from using it. In America, we’ve criminalized it, and we’ve ruined people’s lives now for nearly a hundred years. We’ve put between seven and 800,000 people a year in jail just for cannabis over the last decade.

Emily: It’s so sad. I have a similar story. My father-in-law, who lives here on the same property with us. Before we moved in, he was growing his own medicine in the backyard, and I think he had maybe 10 or 20 plants, and supposedly an off-duty pilot flew over the property and saw the plants. Everybody shows up at the house, the cops, county, and state troopers. He ended up being arrested. He is now a felon. He always says to me, he goes, “I cannot believe that I was arrested. And I am a felon for the exact same thing that you do today legally”.

It always kills me when he says it because it’s so true. I’m doing literally the exact same thing. The only difference is a piece of paper from the government telling me that I’m allowed to. I’ll always feel guilty about that. I always feel bad because it’s not fair. And there’s really no… Even if I did get his conviction expunged, it doesn’t undo the damage that has been done to the rest of his life. And I’m sure you feel the same way.

Bradley: I do, but I just feel fortunate that I’ve been able to do what I’ve done and to live through what I’ve lived through and to be able to use it and maybe to be able to teach other people how to use it and share it.

Emily: If that’s not the silver lining, at least you can turn your pain into purpose and turn that into helping somebody else. Ultimately I feel like with cannabis, when we are so passionate about it, we feel so deeply about it. We have to share it with others. I can see your passion for sharing it with others as well.

Bradley: Yes, ma’am. For over a decade, I’ve been spreading the word on RSO for Rick Simpson Oil and now FECO full-extract cannabis oil. That’s where the medicine for the plant lives.

Emily: Absolutely, and like you said, it’s the entourage effect. For anybody listening who’s not aware, there’s more than just THC to the plant. There’s more than just cannabinoids to the plant. There are cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids. The plant itself has over 500 active compounds. Dr. Ethan Russo proposed this theory of the entourage effect, where all of these things work together in synergy. It really is a magical kind of explanation.

When you think about it, if we pull out THC and we make a synthetic THC, it’s a single molecule; it will never work the same as that full extract like you said, that comes from all parts of the plant and includes all of the goodness of the plant. For anybody listening, the plant is magical. It has more than just THC to it.

Bradley: Absolutely, it’s a miracle… everybody needs it for everything. One of the things my wife has is a cyst; she gets ovarian cysts. There’s a pink patch in Oklahoma that you put on for ladies. It’s called the monthly patch. It’s for when you know ladies have their cycle, their period. She was having a really bad day with her ovarian cyst and put it on and got immediate relief.

Emily: Oh my gosh. There’s nothing like that even in New York that I’ve seen. Oh god, that sounds amazing.

Bradley: The things like that, you know, it’s not about getting high; it’s about making your body feel better.

Emily: Absolutely. What other options do women have besides reaching for a Tylenol, ibuprofen, or a glass of wine? To have a legit option, especially for women in that reproductive health area, would be so nice if everybody had access to that.

Bradley: Absolutely; in California, there are quite a few ladies’ products that they’ve developed, and they’re coming more to Oklahoma. One of the things that we saw in Colorado is, I don’t think this is off color, but blew my mind, is lube.

Emily: Yes, I’ve seen it. Yeah, absolutely. I’ve personally given it a try, and it’s very enjoyable.

Bradley: It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Emily: Absolutely. I feel like a lot of people are maybe shy to talk about it, but as grown adults, it’s important to talk about it because other people are not hearing this in other conversations. Just like cannabis can help mental health and physical health, it can help sexual health and reproductive health as well. Really its powers are limitless.

Bradley: Absolutely. We haven’t found much lube in Oklahoma yet. We’ve been asking about it, and in Colorado, you kind of had to ask, but then once you found the budtenders get all excited to share it with you because it really does work well.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Especially for people who get later in life, especially for women in menopause, that’s hard enough on its own. If there’s something else that can help to get through that time, like a lot of women, I hope listening to this will help you do a little research because you’re missing out. It is a wonderful product.

Bradley: It really is. The way this has gone overall with the tinctures and the oils and the creams and the lotions, I like that a lot. There are a lot of things that people can use there. Like I use something from a company called “The 788 Collection”. It was started by a pediatric nurse, and it’s called the Pain Stick. Man, it helps so much. It’s been a life-changing product.

Emily: I’m so glad you said that, too, because that product you just said, it’s a life-changing product, but for anybody who’s listening who might be afraid of getting high or afraid of feeling unwell when we use products on our skin doesn’t necessarily make us high. That’s a great thing for people to know. It’s a great first step, and if you find relief, you’re not going to get high. But hey, you could feel so much better. I feel like that is huge.

Emily: Oh my gosh. Well, I am like so excited. Not only for what cannabis has done for you and your life but the future of what you and your wife are going to set out to do. I want to be respectful of your time, so I’m going to ask you the same four questions I ask all of my guests. Are you ready? The first one up, what are you most proud of to date?

Bradley: I’m most proud of being able to integrate cannabis into my life in a way that doesn’t make me look like a stereotypical stoner from the seventies. That we’re using this as medicine, that we’re highly functioned and highly happy.

Emily: Oh my gosh, that’s perfect. That is a perfect way to say that. What do you think your life would look like if you didn’t have cannabis?

Bradley: Not fun. Stuck inside pain.

Emily: Yeah, nobody deserves that. I mean, if anybody listening who is living a life of pain, please listen to these words. That cannabis could absolutely help you. Nobody deserves to live in pain, and I’m so happy that you have cannabis I know cannabis has been part of pretty much your whole adult life, but if you could go back 10, 20, 30 years ago and give yourself a piece of cannabis advice, what would it be?

Bradley: As we’re legalizing it, a lot of places are pardoning felonies. And I’ve seen it on the national front when they’ve tried to legalize it; the forgiveness of felonies is one of the things they’ve had on there.

Emily: I do think, eventually, we’re going to have to see it change just because so many people are really getting the bug and being like, “This is life-changing, and you should have never hid it from me in the first place.” I feel like people are starting to wake up and be like, why is this happening like this? And I’m not okay with this anymore, thankfully.

Emily: Well, Bradley, thank you so much for being a part of this conversation, for being so brave and honest and open, and for all the work that you’re going to move forward doing in helping our senior population. Any last words of wisdom for our audience before we say goodbye?