Thoughts, 2 hours after eating an edible

 I'm hoping this is coherent. I'm writing this because the others are asleep - there have been a few appointments and stressors this week, therefore we picked an afternoon to decompress and get high.

This is actually from the second batch of cannabutter I made (same recipe as before, 250g butter, 10g ABV). I opted to make brownies this time around - the recipe I favour is this one Hummingbird Brownie recipe by Hummingbird Bakery (redonline.co.uk). Oh, and I remembered to take a picture of the cannabutter this time!

This batch definitely came out greener. It doesn't seem that way from the pictures, but in real life, it goes from butter coloured to olive oil coloured. 

Baking with it, as before, was a breeze. I picked another recipe that I'd used before and aside from making a huge mess trying to use a jug to gloop brownie batter into a tray, they came out as the usually do.

We tried them today. Book and I went rock climbing this morning, and SK had an appointment and so didn't sleep at all, so we were all a bit tired, a bit low. Out came the brownies. I think a benefit to brownies is that the chocolate flavour masks any 'green' flavour far better than plain cookie dough, so they tasted like normal brownies. Good brownies, because my chosen recipe makes my ideal brownie, but nothing... unusual.

Both Book and SK were fairly exhausted by this time, so the brownies mostly knocked them out, I think. Or, I suppose, allowed them to relax enough to sleep.

I was tired - I think I got five hours sleep last night - but I haven't fallen asleep. So I thought I'd to try explain how an edible affects me, while the information is as accurate as possible. 

I can't remember if I've shared any of this on the blog before so I'll just go from scratch. I get the dry mouth, even with edibles. Around the same time as I notice that, my eyeballs feel sandy. It's not dry, exactly, but gritty almost? My skin feels oversensitive. I feel a bit spacey - although 2010 era 30 Seconds to Mars music videos are playing in the background, so it might just be that my atmosphere is a bit wavy around the edges. 

I don't know that I feel more relaxed. Physically, maybe? Like my arms are a bit slack and legs are floppy. Odd, I've just noticed that. 

My body feels more relaxed but my mind doesn't. With my anxiety, my thoughts are often running all over the place and I don't find that cannabis slows that down at all. It's more like, it makes them slippery. So there's lots of thoughts whipping around my head but I can't quite catch any of them. So I know I'm anxious about something but I can't work out what I'm anxious about. And then it snowballs until I'm anxious about feeling anxious about feeling anxious about...

So it doesn't relax me like that. 

But I guess, after a bit, that anxiety just becomes a constant whine that, while irritating, I can leave in my peripheral vision. And then that spongey, cotton brain becomes light. Like all the anxiety has whipped itself into a whirlwind and suddenly my brain can scrape itself off the bottom of my skull and pretend to be functional for a little while. 

I also feel a bit disconnected from my body, which is also a feeling I welcome. Like I can picture my body as armature, entirely utilitarian and run of the mill, could be one in a million. And all of the other stuff, that's gone, so I don't have to worry about it. It's not there. And you can't really feel anxious about something that's not there, can you?

This is all a bit weird and I might not share this post. I've just kind of spilled the top layer of thoughts onto a keyboard and gone where the wind took me. 

My First Repeat Prescription

Timely as ever, Charles from MaMedica called me this morning to let me know it was time for my repeat prescription and let me know if I had any issues that I could get in touch with them. I asked about making substitutions and he explained how to go about using the system but said to call again if I needed anything.

I received my email with the link to the site as well as my patient ID number and entered the rabbit hole of choosing what I wanted if I was going to make substitutions. I opened up MedBudWiki and spent a fabulous half hour going through the different strains they said were available from MaMedica, reading the descriptions of what each strain is meant to do, as well as checking in with Stripes as she’s going to be the one dealing with the second-hand vapour.

The (so far) invisible Book-Grim has returned to Halls of Residence and as such got no say in what I ordered. It’s okay though – I promised to let her know if I check out anything other than the medical stuff and share any particular goodies.

The actual site seems fairly easy to use – you log in with your details, answer whether it’s a straight repeat or if you are wanting to make substitutions, as well as letting them know any issues/experiences you’ve had with your current prescription.

One of the reasons for my ‘small’ prescription is my previous medical history: I had a stroke and a heart attack, so they wanted to take things slowly with regard to any MC prescriptions. Most of the associated perceived risks are for those who are smoking their cannabis but obvious the clinics have to be careful and I actually really appreciated that.

Although I have experienced couch lock (oh boy, have I experienced couch lock), I haven’t actually had heart palpitations or anything like that over the course of the last six weeks. My main issue has actually been with using the CBD high MC that I received – it consistently gave me a throbbing headache when used on its own with the Mighty or the Arizer; I also found it made me cough – like a lot – and to the extent that I threw up at least once. Mixing it with the THC high MC helped a bit, but I wanted to try something different in the CBD range for that reason.

I made sure to fill in that box with anything that I thought was relevant then made my choices. And, okay, I maybe should have made a note of them but I didn’t. I did make note of the cost though – if accepted, this latest prescription is going to cost me £215. Whoops!

I did note that because of the substitutions, I may have another call where they want to discuss things and I won’t be able to pay for this until next week at the earliest, but so far, when it comes to repeat prescriptions I haven’t found this too painful. I'll keep you updated.

Getting baked...

 Obviously, once we had our cannabutter, we wanted to bake with it. Book in particular had a lot of ideas - garlic bread, cookies, cupcakes, brownies, heaps of toast etc.

Based purely upon the ingredients we had in the kitchen, I suggested something a bit simpler. A fairly basic shortbread recipe, which I'd made before. To indulge Book, I gave her carte blanche to add copious amounts of chocolate chips to zhuzh it up a bit.

I'll grant you, it doesn't look like much. 

The cannabutter was interesting to bake with. We found that it separated a little bit in the jar we were storing it in, with a small amount of water pooling at the bottom. It still smelled very green and I was surprised to discover that this carried through even when it was baked. I think you could taste it, too. It wasn't unpleasant but it did add a slightly verdant tang, which I don't typically have in my cookies. But it behaved like normal butter, as best as I could tell.

Now, did it affect us?

The difficult thing about making edibles at home, with shake, is that it's really difficult to work out the dosing. We had made around 250g of cannabutter, less 10g for Book's toast. That 10g seemed to be a reasonable dose - not so strong as to have anyone locked to the sofa, but enough to give a bit of a buzz. I calculated that to mean that we'd want approximately 10g of cannabutter per biscuit, which meant using around 120g of our cannabutter.

Nobody was completely off their face but I definitely found it affected me and Book said the same. It wasn't as strong as vaping but it was enough to make my brain kind of sandy (I honestly have no idea how else to describe how it feels) and my limbs feel heavy. Book got very chatty and emotional - her typical response - and SK was a little 'floaty'. 

So we considered it a success.

And, of course, success is to be replicated.

OK, please excuse the state of my baking tray. It's well loved and I hadn't realised how grim it looks. I promise it's clean!

Again, I left Book in charge of choosing a recipe. Never one to do things simply, she chose a caramel stuffed NYC style cookie from one of my recipe books. 

We found that the water at the bottom of the jar mixed back into the butter easily - although in hindsight, I'm not sure that we weren't meant to discard it - and again aimed for 10g of cannabutter per cookie. I'm very familiar with the recipe for these cookies; I've made numerous variants of them in the past, so I knew what we were expecting texture and consistency-wise. I don't think the cannabutter behaved any differently to normal butter. Again, you could smell and taste the 'herbal' notes, but none of us seemed to find it off-putting. 

We actually made this batch of cookie dough to store in the freezer to bake off whenever we wanted them, which worked well. They froze well, baked as expected and tasted pretty great! The only flaw we found was user error - using toffees as opposed to softer caramels meant that you had a solid chunk of toffee in the middle of your cookie.

And, of course, if you're going to be eating freshly baked cookies, is there a better way to consume them than with a scoop of ice cream on top?!