A mother heartbroken and frustrated over not being able to help her daughter control her seizures has resorted to making her own cannabis oil.
“The cannabis oil I’m using, it is illegal,” Katrina Spraggon told The Sunday Mail. And while it may be illegal, Spraggon is certainly not shy about telling people. She’s been open and honest about it since using it on her daughter Kaitlyn for the past three years. The nine-year old girl deals with chronic pain from spinal and hip problems — severe physical issues that see the little girl in-and-out of the hospital often.
“It’s all public on Facebook,” said Spraggon. The single mother from Queensland, Australia says the THC in the raw cannabis oil she used stopped the pain, which triggered Kaitlyn’s seizures.
She told The Sunday Mail that Kaitlyn had been prescribed a cocktail of strong opioids and other prescription drugs to deal with her 19 medical conditions but they left her heavily sedated. And that after back surgery, Kaitlyn would be “knocked out for two to three days in the hospital.” And when Spraggon started implementing cannabis oil after her daughter’s back surgery’s, it was like night and day. “Eight or nine o’clock at night, same night [as the surgery], she’s up in the ICU bed dancing. You just have to look at her for yourself.”
Spraggon is now trying everything in her power to get Queensland Health to prescribe medical cannabis, but says Lady Cilento Hospital threatened to no longer treat Kaitlyn if she continued with the homemade oil. Spraggon says police even searched her home the day Kaitlyn returned from the hospital.
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A spokesman for Health Minister Cameron Dick said doctors could prescribe raw cannabis if they believed it would benefit patients. “Ms. Spraggon was advised that under Queensland’s new legal framework an application for medicinal cannabis could be made by Kaitlyn’s pediatric specialist if the specialist considered it could provide a clinical benefit.”
He says to date, 20 applications have been submitted from medical practitioners across Queensland to prescribe medicinal cannabis
