CHS: The Price I Paid Trying to Feel Normal
Last week, Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, I got hit with another CHS episode. Probably my 10th or 12th one at this point. At some point you stop calling it “bad luck” and realize your body is basically filing formal complaints against you.
Still recovering. Slowly getting better every day. Eating potatoes like they’re Michelin star meals. Shoutout to boiled potatoes. Didn’t know that was where my life was headed.
A few things that actually helped me:
Hot showers
Capsaicin cream on the stomach (lightly… unless you want to feel like Satan is doing hot yoga on your abdomen)
Constantly sipping water while puking. Weird strategy, but I usually kept more down than came back up.
Things that did absolutely nothing for me personally:
Zofran
anti-nausea meds
patches
lidocaine patches
basically everything they hand you on the way out the ER door
Here’s the part that’s probably important for some people reading this:
I’m probably 3–4 years into this cycle.
At first I thought it was something else. How could it be weed? I convinced myself it was cyclical vomiting syndrome for probably a year. Honestly, some of the doctors did too.
Part of that was because I wasn’t fully truthful about my weed use. Part of it was because I genuinely didn’t see the correlation. When something becomes part of your everyday routine, your brain stops viewing it as a possible problem.
Then eventually the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.
And the weird realization is this:
I wasn’t smoking to party. I was smoking to feel normal. Quieter brain. Better mood. Food tastes better. Music sounds better. Life feels softer around the edges.
Then one day you realize the thing helping you “feel normal” is the exact thing making you not normal anymore.
What finally changed for me wasn’t the puking. I can handle suffering. It was watching what this does to the people around me that care about me. Wife. Kids. Family. Seeing them worried while I’m laying there looking like a haunted Civil War survivor.
So here’s the plan:
No smoking. I’m gonna stay off it until I can pass a piss test, then probably stay off another couple months after that and reevaluate life with a clear head.
And honestly? Sobriety sounds kinda peaceful right now.
Also, moderation and me historically haven’t exactly been teammates. If I like something, my brain’s natural instinct is:
“Cool. Let’s do all of it.”
I’m not some burnout stereotype either. Professional career. Wife. Kids. Responsibilities. Which is exactly why I wanted to post this. A lot of people dealing with CHS are functioning adults who slowly normalized being high all the time because it helped them cope with stress, quiet their brain, sleep, eat, whatever.
Until eventually your body taps out before your mind does.
Life’s a giant experiment, I guess. I’m just trying to stop running portions of mine in constant pain.
Hopefully this helps somebody else break the cycle a little sooner than I did.