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Topics: Mental Health, Health, Drugs, US News
Liv Bridge
Topics: Mental Health, Health, Drugs, US News
A woman who has come clean about her chronic cannabis habit has revealed the debilitating symptoms of her 'scromiting' disorder.
As many as 17 percent of Americans have confessed to smoking weed as of 2023, which isn't so shocking when you consider the fact 24 states legalized marijuana for recreational use.
However, medics are now warning there's an emerging new side effect for chronic smokers, who use cannabis daily or almost daily, after ERs have become overrun with patients suffering from abdominal pain and severe or prolonged vomiting.
Now, one young woman has confessed to have suffered the debilitating condition.
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Sydni Collins, 23, told The New Post that she first tried weed as a teenager and has since relied on her weed pen most days since turning 16.
Yet years of toking the substance has taken a nasty toll on her body, leaving her suffering with extreme waves of nausea and vomiting, including one grim journey where she vomited during the entirety of her flight in spring break of her senior year.
“There were some days when it lasted until noon and I would not go to school because of how bad it was,” Sydni told the outlet.
“I would be puking all morning. I would let out yells or cries because nothing would come out. I was just dry heaving.”
Medics eventually diagnosed her with cannabis hyperemesis syndrome (CHS), which comes with a plethora of gnarly symptoms, including 'scromiting', a mixture of screaming and vomiting simultaneously.
The World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases has recently listed the condition on their website in response to the surge in CHS cases, though many doctors are still unfamiliar with the syndrome, leading to misdiagnoses.
This was the case for a long time for Sydni as medics struggled to figure out what was wrong with her.
At one point, her nightmarish symptoms even saw her racing to hospital seven times in a month where she was hooked up to a feeding tube.
“There would be some days where I felt better than others and I would feel fine,” she continued. “I was like, ‘I can go eat. I can go out of the house.’ And then, within hours, I would go back to vomiting and stomach pain.
"I would be in the fetal position on the bed for hours because that was the only way my stomach didn’t hurt as bad."
When doctors finally figured out what was wrong, she had suffered a dramatic weight loss, coming in at just 87lbs (6 stone 3lbs).
Even with the tube, she struggled to get back to a healthy weight and matters worse, the CHS made food appear very unappetizing.
"My mom got me a bunch of nutritional supplements and I could not bear the taste of anything, even Gatorade,” she added. “I would chew on ice cubes. I would lick the salt off pretzel rods. Cold washcloths helped.”
After quitting for nine months, Sydni was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which causes inflammation in the digestive tract and can also lead to chronic nausea, stomach cramps and weight loss.
“Getting diagnosed with that made me think that’s probably what [the original symptoms] were from and it wasn’t the weed,” she said.
So she picked up her weed pen once more - and three years after her 'first big episode' suffered another one, where she again 'lost a bunch of weight' and was hooked to a feeding tube.
“I’m not what you would think of as your typical stoner … and people outside of my friend group and close family didn’t even know I smoked,” she continued.
"The only way to figure out if [my symptoms] were from weed is if I stopped. So I did, and I got better.”