So I really found the stories on here so helpful while I overcame CHS, so I felt like posting my story is the least I could do for those suffering.
So my relationship with weed started when i was about 16 years old. At first, I would only do edibles and maybe only like two or three a week. That went on for about 8 months. And then i started to do edibles or smoking about 5 times a week and that lasted for a year. Then (at this point I was about 18, I began to smoke just about everyday and I would do so before running. Four months after smoking daily I switched to vaporizing (I had a Pax 2), and I basically still did it daily but instead of smoking I would vape.So yeah I just about experimented with every form of intake of this incredible plant.
Fast forward a year after my daily use of smoking/vaping (I had just turned 19) and I got very sick with what I thought at the time was either food poisoning or the stomach virus. This first episode lasted about 2 days with intense vomiting and then 3 more days before I felt 100% again.
Then, a exactly month after my first episode, I wake up in the middle of the night around 3 or 4 am and I have intense stomach cramps and shortly after waking up I start puking for about an hour straight. Surprisingly though, i could go back to sleep around 5am and when i woke up 6 hours later, I felt completely fine. So this incident to me just maybe seemed like a weird anomaly and I kinda just swept it under the rug.
Ok, now here's the really bad part... a month after my second bout, I get sick on 8/13/16 which was a Sunday, around 7pm. I am vomiting for about an hour and then I felt better by around 9pm. The next day, I wake up and feel completely fine... only to experience the exact same thing at the same time later in the day. Then this same thing repeats the next day and the next day, which at this point is Wednesday. Finally, I tell my mom whats going on (she's a doctor), and she seems very perplexed. I would smoke a bowl to calm my symptoms after the vomiting ceased for a little each day and I felt like the weed helped significantly in the short term for helping my symptoms, and so thats why when my mother told me that it could be the weed causing I absolutely looked at her like she was a fool. Little did I know she just about saved my life.
So she forwards me a couple links discussing CHS, and I just wanted the symptoms to stop so bad that I fed into what she was saying and quit smoking that Wednesday 8/16/16.
This is where it gets really bad. Im not sure if part of what I experienced from that Wednesday on was just from my withdrawal or if it was just completely the hyperemesis syndrome's inevitable course, but from Thursday until Monday (8/17/16 to 8/21/16) I was in the worst pain of my life by far. It stopped being just an hour at the same time like it was for the first three days, and I started to literally throw up about 3 times every 5 hours with it waking me up at all hours of the night and keeping me up at night. I don't even know which was worse during these last days, the mornings or the nights but all I know is they all felt incredibly painful. I went from being a healthy and fit girl weighing 132 pounds to weighing 119.... all in one week. Thankfully, the cessation of my usage proved successful and as I write this on Sept 1, I am sitting in my college dorm symptom free and back to the girl I was before CHS claimed me as its victim.
I did go to the hospital on the second Sunday that I was experiencing symptoms, and of course they diagnosed me with CHS and gave me phenergan and Zofran, both of which were useless honestly. But one thing that did actually help a lot was Ativan. Ativan is a short-term anxiety medication, and because this illness is literally in the brain and not the stomach I think it is a lot more useful than any medication that is typically used for vomiting.
Another thing to note about my illness, the hot showers did NOT help at all. I'm not sure if it was because I just felt so dehydrated after them or if it was the intense heat that typically makes me feel nauseous but they absolutely did not help me. And I saw someone post that you have to be smoking for 7+ years to get CHS and I just wanna say thats absolutely false as I only had been using the drug for 3 and my daily use was only for 2 years.
I am a lucky one. I had a great support network. My mom's expert opinion, and I got healthy in time to go back to Harvard and continue my studies. I really am so thankful for this thread (with the exception of a few idiotic posts trying to falsify this syndrome), and I really want anyone going through this to reach out to me. Seriously.
Weed will always be my favorite drug and I will continue to spread the word of this magnificent plant, but I think especially with the legalization conversation on the table, we need to just be real with ourselves and concede that just like anything that has mind-altering effects on the brain, moderation is key. Obviously 99% of chronic tokers will never even experience a day of this syndrome, but spreading awareness doesn't hurt. Thanks for reading my story.
TL;DR - 5'3" 132 lbs girl smokes weed daily for two years. has three episodes exactly one month apart, quits weed and gets better about 7 days later. Hot showers, phernergen, and Zofran didn't help, but ATIVAN HELPED.