A Medical Mystery — For Two and a Half Years
For two and a half years, I was a medical mystery.
I went in and out of hospitals more times than I can count. Scopes went up one side and down the other. Hydrogen breath tests. Blood panels. Stool samples. MRIs. CT scans. They threw the book at me — and every single test came back with nothing. No answers. No diagnosis. Just more appointments, more bills, and more mornings hunched over a toilet wondering what was wrong with my body.
My diet shrank down to almost nothing. Eventually I couldn't eat real food at all. I was surviving on Ensure drinks. I spent thousands of dollars chasing a diagnosis that nobody seemed able to give me.
A Symptom I Didn't Have — But Many People Do
One of the most well-known signs of CHS is something I actually never experienced myself: compulsive hot showering. Many CHS sufferers describe standing in scalding water for long stretches during episodes — not knowing why it helped, just knowing that it did. Some spend hours a day in the shower just to get through.
That wasn't my experience. But I've since learned it's one of the most consistent and telling indicators of Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome — and it's one of the clearest clues a doctor can use to identify it. The fact that it wasn't part of my picture is actually part of why it took so long. CHS doesn't always look the same.
Cannabis Was the Last Thing I Suspected
Cannabis was the last thing I tried giving up. I'd been using it for over a decade, long before any of this started. It felt completely unrelated. It was supposed to help nausea, not cause it — that's what I'd always heard. So it sat at the bottom of my list.
Until finally, out of options and out of answers, I stopped.
Four or five days later, I started feeling better. Not dramatically, not all at once — just better. Then a little more better. Then more. I tried cannabis again after about a week and nearly threw up on the spot. That was the confirmation I didn't know I needed.
I haven't smoked since. I don't miss it. I don't regret it for a single day.
What I Do Regret
What I do regret is the two and a half years. The money. The fear. The endless procedures that turned up nothing because no one thought to ask the right question.
"If someone had handed me a resource like this — if this site had existed — I might have figured it out in weeks instead of years."
That's why ClearCHS.org exists. Not to lecture anyone about cannabis. Not to judge. But because nobody should spend 2.5 years in and out of hospitals, eating nothing but Ensure, running up medical bills, and feeling completely alone with something that has a name, an explanation, and a way out.
What's on the Other Side
The proof of what's waiting? After I got well, I wrote a full musical. Country Club Wrestling — the musical. When you feel good again — really good, in a way you'd forgotten was possible — you find out what you're actually capable of.
