The other day, a video popped up on my Facebook memories. It was from a year ago, capturing the first time Solly said, “no!” It may not seem like much, but we were so thrilled that, at age 5, he was finally (finally!!!!!) saying “no” appropriately and unprompted.

This video was taken roughly a month and a half before we began our trial with medical cannabis. Since then, Solly has been communicating – both speaking and using augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) – so much that it seems hard for us to remember the time when we ached for him to be able to tell us what he was thinking or what he wants, so when these memories pop up on social media, it helps us to recognize how far he has come in such a short time. While he had a handful of words before medical cannabis, we still struggled to really understand his preferences, what he wanted to do, and what he wanted to eat.

In mid-March of 2020, we had our first appointment with Dr. Bonni Goldstein, which kickstarted our trial with cannabis. I wrote a bit about our experience with CBD and THCa a few months later, when we first saw an unbelievable explosion of expressive speech. Shortly after writing the blog post, keeping up with our experimentation flew off my plate as I became hyper-focused on Solly trying to get an IEP before the start of school, deciding to pull him from public school, feeling like I was thrown in the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim as I navigated putting together and teaching a homeschooling curriculum while being the primary caregiver, home therapist, medical coordinator, Mom to both Solly and Bea, and so much more.

Once I got my feet back under me and got into the groove of homeschooling and more organized with our day-to-day, we jumped back into our trial-and-error adventure with medical cannabis.

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