Trying low dose steroids while in the city

I thought I should add a update to the blog here since it has been a while, and came across some people that actually read it in real life! So let me give you guys a quick synopsis of the last 2 years of topical steroid withdraw I have endured.

 For the most part, I have been doing pretty good. Basically, for the last 2 years I have been off of all steroids and chasing the sun ;) Once it starts getting cold here in Seattle, Wa in the fall, my eczema starts getting worse. So this year (2017) and last year (2016) I moved to South America to go back to the sun for the winter. Sun and clean fresh air is what seems to keep my skin clear. As long as I have that I am fine. Also entering a new environment in Colombia helped my allergies immensely as well. The food and air is much cleaner and healthier down there, plus the humidity keeps my skin moist and not dry.

I was actually living in South America for the good part of 6 months (from December 2016 to July 2017). I found a nice place in Medellin Colombia that I only had to pay $500 rent for and was on the 10th floor of a nice apartment building. While in Colombia, my skin was completely clear, no issues what so ever. I actually felt like a completely different person! And when I returned, my family said I seem completely different too. I looked way better and was way more relaxed.

But then I had to return to Seattle... Partly because of the Visa restrictions and my work. I run an indie computer game company called 5D Realities. Most the time I can take my computer abroad and do programming but now that the company is growing rapidly I needed to return back to the states to manage things. So I returned in July 2017, got an office in Seattle and for the most part things were fine during the Summer. I noticed I did flare more here in Seattle... but as long as I got summer sunlight and got fresh air out in the mountains on the weekends, I was fine. But now that fall is here and I am under a lot of stress from work I started to break out pretty bad...

On top of that in early October I got a really bad cold. And my skin was flaring and my asthma was horrible. Then the cold moved to my chest and there was a day where I literally could not breath... I even took multiple sessions of the nebulizer for asthma and still couldn't breath. So I went to an emergency walk in clinic. The doctor basically said, you need to take some sort of cortisone/ steroid or your going to pass out and maybe die... So she gave me 5 days of 60mg prednisone.

Talk about a dilemma I was in. The doctor basically wanted to put be on the Devil again! This was a huge decision I had to make. Go back to the steroids or try and wait out the cold.... So I came to a compromise, instead of doing the whole 60 mg dose a day, I took one 20mg pill and split in half and tried that. So 10mg. Of coarse the steroid helped like magic and I felt way better... I stayed on 10mg a day for like a week. Then I switched to 5mg a day for another week, and now I am taking 5mg every other day. My cold is completely gone and my athema and skin has stayed clear for the most part.

I just had an appointment with a dermatologist and asked her, what if I was to stay on 5mg every other day of prednisone? Is this going to be unhealthy? And have long term side effects? Her response was basically she was surprised this was helping at all because that is a small dose. She said an average body naturally produces 10mg to 15mg or natural cortisone a day. And she said perhaps my body is lower and that 5mg might be helping give a small boost to my natural amount. I also found some reports on the long term use of really low doses of prednisone. Basically the conclusion is, the side effects are minimal as found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11642646

So after weighing the ups and downs I am thinking I might stay on this low dose prednisone. At least while here in the city during the winter. I have to say it does feel strange having the hormone in my system. Even at this low doses. Life almost seem too easy, or trivial. And kind of has this wierd sensation like I am in movie or something? Hard to explain.

But this is basically a quick update I where I am at. My basic conclusion is I think my body produces small amounts of natural cortisone. Probably because I was on so much synthetic steroids as a kid that my body just never learned to produce it... So supplementing with small amounts of predinsone seems to help and keep my skin and asthma in check here in the city, during high stress periods, and during the winter.

Will keep you guys updated here but that is where I am at.

Medical Marijuana

This is a sketchy topic to discuss but I feel the need to share my experience so far. Please don’t view me as a "pot head" because I am far from it.  I personally think there is something amazing about marijuana. I believe it truly is a miracle plant. And here is why. 

First of all, do a YouTube search, "Marijuana cures" and you will be bombarded with people stories of how cannabis has cured all sorts of diseases, especially cancer. It’s a tragedy that or government is making research so hard because it is illegal. I think the drug companies in power are stopping research from being done because the legalization of marijuana would cripple their business. For sure. 

Anyways, let’s talk about my experience. I was introduced to cannabis when my younger brother offered me a pot cookie he got from his friend. With my knowlege of canabis now, there was probably around 50 to 100 mg of THC in that cookie. A normal dose is 10mg. This was 4 months ago and I would try anything to relive the pain. So I ate it. Not much happened in the first 30 min - so with the limited knowledge about editable I decided to eat more... and 15 min later I was stoned! I mean really stoned. I was not expecting the body high that I got. I couldn't talk or even think clearly. And to be honest I was freaking out. I was Paranoid! And now looking back I know exactly why I felt Paranoid. 

Here is what I thing marijuana does. When ingesting marijuana your body processes it way different then smoking it. It converts the THC to other compounds that induce a stronger high, and the high can be 4 times stronger the smoking it. But it is this high where the healing can begin. Let me explain...

Besides taking pain away (which it does greatly), I think marijuana is literally a time machine for your mind. Yeah now I sound crazy haha. For me personally (each person is different) when I eat a pot cookie alone (alone is different than with people around, trust me) I start analyzing my life. I go back and look at my childhood experiences and memories and see how they made me the person I am today. It’s like the marijuana slows down your brain frequency and like tuning into a different channel, you tune into a different perspectives on your life. You can make connections you wouldn’t normally notice. Things like houses, people, places all have a history and feeling associated with them. When I had the cookie at my parents house I could literally hear voices from the past and memories would flash before my eyes. At certain times I wanted to cry. Not until you eat the marijuana you can start picking up those frequencies. For me, the first couple times eating the cookies I felt anxious and afraid. This is because my subconcious was opening up and exposing so much information to me that I didn’t know how to handle it. My brain and emotions were overloaded.

It is meditation on these profound thoughts and truths that enable the healing. You can clearly see where and why the sickness is occurring. Where you went wrong. I can tell that my body will take a long time to recover but I can also see the path. I can see how bad I screwed by body up :( I wrote the other day while high this: "The creams made my skin look healthy but my truth was burried. The sickness and longing my spirit would weep through the skin. When I was two months in and looked like hell. That what my spirit looked like underneath my skin-- puke, that is so disgusting, why i would do that too myself."

It is a clear understanding like this that you begin to fully understand. You begin to understand who you are and how we are so tightly intertwined with nature and the energies around us. The artificial creams blocked that perspective and made me sick.

I feel the inflamed skin cells moving up and out of my body now. It is a very very slow process. But I see it and understand it now. Give me another year and I will be a totally renewed person.

 Let me note I sometimes smoke it now but it gives me bad asthma sometimes, so I will continue to eat it. Smoking it is way lighter on a high. Every person experienced eating marijuana/ editable different. And if the edible has butter in it, the high will be stronger because of the way it fuses with the fat proteins. But for me it seems to be helping. What I have been doing is like have 2 days out of the week to "medicate” myself, then take a couple days to analyze my experience and how my body is changing. 

Marijana also exposed to me how f'd up our society is. Living in corporate America you can see how businesses and cooperations choose profits over the well being of others. Not all businesses are bad but there is a lot of greed going around these days. It will be this greed that tests America to its limit, and if the people are not carfull and fight for their freedoms it could overtake the world. 

Anyways, leave any comments or questions below!

Also watch this video (ignore the first min or so where they talk about the bodies haha), there is a place in this video where Joe Rogan perfectly describes the power of editable!  http://youtu.be/TuH5We_WEQo