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On any given weekend from summer 2010 to fall 2011, you might have found me driving back from Kansas, on the lookout for cops and scrupulously observing all traffic laws, because I was transporting felony levels of marijuana in the trunk of my car.

It sounds quaint now, doesn’t it? At the time of this writing, there are now almost 200 marijuana dispensaries in the state of Missouri, seven within fifteen miles of my house.

I only transported a few times by myself. Most often, my husband, Patrick, would go alone, usually during the workday when there was less traffic. No, we were not dealers. We were carting around bulk quantities of weed because Patrick was on dialysis. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it was the only thing keeping him alive.

In January 2009, at the age of 28, Patrick went into end-stage renal failure due to an autoimmune disorder. He opted to do home dialysis, and in April 2009, underwent surgery to have a peritoneal dialysis (PD) catheter placed. For the next sixteen months or so, I watched him wither away. My husband is not a large man. He is 5’5”, and a healthy weight for him is around 145 lbs. By summer 2010, he weighed 120 lbs. He was constantly nauseated, constantly vomiting. Kidneys filter waste from your body. Without them, you develop a condition called uremia, the buildup of urea and other waste products, which causes fluid overload, electrolyte imbalances, metabolic abnormalities, all sorts of fun stuff. Hence, all the barfing. Dialysis offsets the effects of uremia well enough to keep a person alive, though, of course, quality of life varies from patient to patient.

Dialysis also leaches protein from the body. So, Patrick’s medical team wanted him to eat at least nine grams of protein a day, preferably animal protein. Is there anything less appealing than meat when you’re feeling nauseated? I think not. Just the smell of it cooking made him feel sick. But no food of any kind appealed to him. He could manage egg salad, the occasional protein shake.

I went online, looked up what cancer patients did, and tried all the recommended tricks– Popsicles, his favorite foods. I set the table with a pretty tablecloth, flowers, and candlelight, trying to make meals as inviting as possible. The doctors prescribed medications– Periactin, which gave him strange dreams and hallucinations, but did not stimulate his appetite. Reglan, which caused a full psychotic episode– that experience was so scary, I almost called an ambulance. And finally, Marinol– synthetic marijuana. Because regular old marijuana was still illegal. California had legalized medical marijuana back in the 90s, but otherwise, the US was still firmly a country of prohibition. Colorado and Washington would not legalize for another three years.

In Missouri, as I recall, possession of anything over an ounce was a felony. Transporting large quantities of marijuana across state lines, as I was doing, would be considered trafficking. If I had been caught, I would have been looking at twenty years in a federal facility. But we had run out of all the legal options. I checked around with everyone we knew until I found someone who could get us a joint, just to see if it would work.

It did. Not only did it help his appetite, it also helped him sleep– yet another fun side effect of kidney failure and dialysis, especially PD, is insomnia.

A quick crash-course in PD– you have a catheter in your abdomen, so at all times, there is an open wound in your stomach. You hook your catheter up to the dialysis machine, which has bags of fluid called dialysate. The machine pumps the fluid into your abdominal cavity where it sits, soaks up the toxins, and then gets pumped back out. The exit tubing can be emptied into a bucket, or, in our case, we ran a tube down the hallway to the bathroom, so it could empty directly into the toilet. Unfortunately, this method of dialysis can lead to something called “drain pains.” Imagine a Capri Sun bag. The dialysis catheter is like the straw, and your abdominal cavity is the bag. You know how sometimes, the straw gets stuck against the side of the bag, so while you’re sucking at the straw, you’re not getting fluid, you’re just crumpling the bag? That’s basically how drain pains work, the catheter getting stuck against the abdominal wall while still trying to suck out the fluid, which creates a very painful, tugging/cramping sensation. Also, at the time, PD catheters only came in one size. So a child, or even a small adult like Patrick, had the same size catheter in his abdominal cavity as, say, a 300-lb dude. Lovely, right? These drain pains were one of the main reasons for his insomnia.

I don’t remember how we got in touch with the pot dealer in Kansas, but he wasn’t just a dealer– he was a grower. Even now, I hesitate to share too many details about this person, but his operation was something to behold. He had a home with an unusually large basement, which he had installed with grow lights, misters, and an industrial air filtration system. (When you have rows and rows of marijuana plants in an enclosed space, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that there’s an odor. Without the filtration system, you’d be able to smell it from outside the house. Hell, with the amount that guy was growing, I think the scent would have permeated the entire block.) He was sympathetic to our situation, so he gave us a very good bulk rate, and we only had to visit him once or twice a month.

Sounds like we’d found a solution, right? Sort of. Patrick needed to smoke anytime he ate, so three square meals a day was three doses. He also needed it to sleep, so that was four. And then he needed it anytime the nausea was too bad, which was often. Then, Patrick is one of those people whose drug tolerance rises quickly, so he needed to smoke more than the average person. We were spending $400-$600 on marijuana every month, easily. With only me working and Patrick receiving the pittance that is disability, that was not sustainable.

So, the grower suggested we build a grow op in our basement. He would provide the plans and even some materials, including plants, for a hydroponic grow. We would care for the plants, harvest them, and keep most of the yield– unless he needed some, of course. Then we would give some to him. I know how it sounds, but he really was trying to help us out– running a grow op in our basement carried about the same amount of risk as crossing state lines to buy it, but we wouldn’t have to shell out hundreds of dollars for it, and even save ourselves some gas money in the bargain.

Yes, they technically carried the same amount of risk, but I was soon to find out how much more nerve-wracking it was to be running a criminal enterprise out of your home, even if it was only for your own consumption. Being caught with even a single plant in our state carried an automatic sentence of twenty years. And while, yeah, driving around with a trunkload of weed was scary, once the drive was over, it was pretty much over. A grow op in your basement is something you live with, literally. Every night, you go to bed wondering if someone is going to find out– a meter reader, the mailman, the driver who delivered Patrick’s dialysis supplies and wheeled them inside on a dolly, a Jehovah’s Witness, somebody. Or what if there’s a fire? What if I did need to call 911 for some reason?  

I don’t remember when, but at some point during all this, I started to have panic attacks. Once the grow op was up and running in our basement, I almost had to be hospitalized. The stress of Patrick’s condition, the financial strain, having to take on all the household chores by myself– all while working, attending night classes, and dealing with my own chronic health problems, was too much. I know the movies and TV shows make the criminal life look glamorous and exciting, but lemme tell you, it’s constant worry and paranoia. Or maybe I just wasn’t cut out for it. I’d been a goody-goody in high school. I didn’t even try pot until I was 24 or 25, and only then because I was trying to manage my own pain and nausea. My mother, upon picking me up one day at the office to have lunch, remarked that my coat smelled like pot. I remember willing myself not to faint– if she could smell it on me, so could my coworkers, my boss, the other students in my classes, my professors. I mumbled something about attending a party where people were smoking, and that seemed to satisfy her. She knew that I would never have anything to do with drugs. God, no.

There was another incident when a neighbor dropped by to visit. When he stepped inside our living room, he inhaled deeply. Fortunately for us, he was a stoner, so he just sighed, “Your house smells delicious.”

That year, we had a lot of rain. The neighborhood sewage system backed up– every house for several blocks had a foot of standing water in the basement. Including us.

I cannot express to you the abject terror I felt, frantically wading around in sewer water, gathering plants and supplies into trash bags, loading them into the car, and driving them to multiple dumpsters around town to get rid of them all before I could call the insurance company. I needed them to come out and assess the damage from the flooding as soon as possible, so we could get the mess cleaned up– did I mention I was living with a dialysis patient with an open wound in his gut? The house would have to be professionally sanitized for him to safely live there. Additionally, the flood took out our hot water heater, our washer and dryer. Our basement had a little living area and it took out the carpet, as well as many other belongings which ended up in a sodden heap on the curb.

As if that weren’t enough, my brother descended on us one weekend. He and his roommate had had a falling out, and he needed to crash on our couch– just for the weekend, he assured me. I said, “Okay, but we can’t have visitors here.” My brother, himself a pothead, knew about the grow op. He said he understood, mum’s the word and all that. “Just the weekend?” I asked. Just the weekend, he affirmed. A week. Two weeks, tops. Also, would it be okay if our uncle came over? Our uncle had a truck and could help him move his stuff in.

Another sidebar: my uncle (now departed). This was a man with a serious cocaine problem. So serious, he resorted to breaking and entering to support said habit. He had spent most of his adult life in prison. I felt that him coming to my House of Ganja would be, to put it mildly, unwise. So I said no.

Naturally, a few days later, my uncle showed up with a load of my brother’s stuff. He was drunk, so as he was backing into the driveway, he backed into my front porch, nearly collapsing the whole thing entirely. Then he staggered out of the cab, bellowing racial slurs at top volume because he couldn’t believe that I lived in a Black neighborhood. Sheepishly, my brother went out to deal with him. As they started bringing boxes in, my uncle did his usual B&E bugaloo– wandering around every room, noting the entrances and exits, evaluating every stick of furniture and possession. (He had robbed my parents’ house and my grandparents’ house at least once each, that we know of.) My uncle did not remark on the smell in the house– again, he was quite drunk, but I also wonder if years of smoking cigarettes and doing blow had wrecked his nose. I hoped this was the case. (Sorrynotsorry.) I had to excuse myself. I went into my bedroom, shut the door, sat down on the bed, and had a very long and well-deserved meltdown.

Of course, my brother ended up staying three months, and of course, he kept bringing buddies over. The one good thing that came out of it was a new porch– my brother tore down and replaced the damaged one. He’s a good handyman, and the new porch turned out very nice. Still, we wanted him to GTFO sooner rather than later. We dropped some very strong hints to that effect– as in, we left apartment listings out for him, and he finally did us that favor.

I think we only grew pot for about seven months. It felt much longer. After the flooded basement, we didn’t want to start over, nor did we go back to the grower in Kansas. We found closer drug dealers and did what normal people do, bought by the ounce– still more expensive than we could comfortably afford, and still quite illegal, but our stress levels lessened somewhat. Patrick started experimenting with ways to get more bang for our buck– he tried baking edibles, making tinctures, and finally settled on a Magic Flight Box, which became his preferred method for a few years. (In other words, he started vaping before it was cool.) It used far less pot than a joint or a pipe and gave him a more concentrated hit of THC. Now he uses vape cartridges. 

In June 2012, Patrick received a kidney transplant. Transplant surgery takes at least a year to recover from– the patient’s body is bombarded with immunosuppressant drugs, which makes them incredibly vulnerable to infection. After Patrick’s surgery, we were not even allowed to bring live plants to his room. When he was released from the hospital, he was advised to stay home as much as possible for the first year.

I wish I could tell you this was the happy ending, but that wasn’t the end. The transplant team have to figure out the right drugs and dosages to prescribe, and Patrick had a severe allergic reaction to one of them. There were more surgical procedures to remove the PD catheter and related hardware. The medical bills destroyed us, so in 2013, we had to declare bankruptcy, and our house was foreclosed on. The grow-op equipment was long gone by then, but I did wonder what the buyers made of that basement, with all the strange alterations we’d made. Patrick transitioned off disability and went back to work, but we learned another harsh lesson– the Social Security Administration can decide, at any time, that you’ve been overpaid and can demand that you pay back the “overage,” regardless of whether you did anything wrong or not, regardless of whether you are still collecting benefits or not. So it took us several long, painful years to pay back $20,000, on top of the seven-year stain bankruptcy left on our credit scores.

Patrick still relies on medical marijuana. Kidney patients are notorious for having digestive issues, like irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel diseases. The antirejection medications kill probiotics and disrupt the intestinal immune system. Fortunately, marijuana became legal in Missouri in 2022, so he now has a medical card. As do I. I still can’t get over it. I can’t get over how easy it is now, to place an order on a dispensary’s website and then go pick it up– they even have drive-through! I expect I will never get over it. This type of experience isn’t something that you just get over. But that’s okay. I’ve learned to live with it, as people can learn to live with so many things. There is something that outweighs all the pain and trauma– the knowledge that I did what I had to do for the person I love. That I came through for him. And I know that he would do the same for me.