TSC Talks guest Danielle, Dani McQueen, is a true champion in the cannabis world, business owner, who has been nominated with Best Cannabis Company of the Year, Maine Cannabis Activist, Business Leader of the Year, Champion in Corrupt Responsibility, Best Innovation: Hot Cocoa, and Young Entrepreneur of the Year. While that, she is also a mother of a special superhero little girl that suffers from the same autoimmune disease as she does. Danielle demonstrates her rough path but also her strength to follow her instincts, and as every human being, with doubts and uncertainty but reaches an amazing lifestyle for her family while also helping other families. She shares a story of overcome but also the real struggle as a person who suffers from Ankylosing Spondylitis. Danielle just really uprooted herself and moved to Maine to help her child and herself. I’m just very impressed with what I’ve learned so far. Danielle shares her story timeline with us on the next few quotes.
“I always knew I wanted to help people. At an early age, I also knew something was wrong with me too. I had gotten into a little bit of trouble at school. I love the gymnastics part in flipping and I thought I could do this. But I also started to realize that I was getting pains, you know, and everyone kind of chalked it up until I was probably around 16, when it really started to affect me. By 17 years old I started, you know, I’ve seen every doctor. I’ve been diagnosed with lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, to everything. So, being diagnosed with so many diagnoses, it’s just because it was kind of unknown. It was a little by 18 when they had known that it was Ankylosing Spondylitis and I was put on oxycodone.”
“This next month, I’ll be going into my third surgery, they’ll be doing a full fusion from the cervix down. Just because I’ve had so many slipped discs and fractures that are kind of just deteriorating. So I’m a little nervous.”
“Every time something like this happens I think of my daughter, what her future might look like. Because like I was saying, when I was a teenager, they put me on oxycodone and it helps, of course. Back then, these drugs were just coming to market. These doctors were taught by the pharmaceuticals that these were lifesavers or they were for some people, I’m not denying that fact. But for me, being so young, I probably shouldn’t have been put on oxycodone. Over time, it stopped helping. And at this point, I was in college and I was going to school to be a nurse and now at this time, after oxycodone, I’m put on the fentanyl patch and this I’m using with the oxycodone. The fentanyl patch and the oxycodone. So now I’m in school and I’m learning in the medical world. And I start to learn that maybe I shouldn’t be on these doses. Maybe I shouldn’t be on these medications. Maybe it’s okay to question the doctors.”
“I was a manager of a Suboxone clinic a few years ago, and I thought to myself, I was no different than these people, except they went to get their drugs from the street; I just had to go to my doctor. She’d write me a prescription and I’d be on my way. I mean, there was no difference to me.”
“I just felt something was wrong. I feel really guilty saying this. One time I’d walked into my doctor’s office to get a prescription. There were a lot of people in police uniforms and there are people carrying boxes and the nurse was really sneaky about getting me into a room. I don’t remember seeing the doctor that day. I just saw my prescription. And I was in a haze. I feel like from 18 to 22 I literally feel like I don’t recall a lot of how I managed to graduate school and do the things I did in that time period, still amazing to me. But that next day I read in the newspaper that my doctor was under investigation for overprescribing narcotics. There were a lot of overdoses in our town at that time. And this doctor was connected to them. Well, next thing I know I’m being called by the board of medicine because my medical records have been found outside of her office being disposed of. So now I’m caught in this, ‘I’m addicted to drugs. who’s going to supply my drugs now. This is so embarrassing. It’s in the newspaper. I’m in the medical field.’ I went through this stage of full-blown depression, I didn’t know what to do on my bed. Thankfully, it was a time of my life- life has given back to me because I had no choice other than to either go to the streets and become a drug addict or detox. And I don’t recommend detoxing at home, but I was too ashamed to go to the same hospital I worked in. And so I detox at home. The worst 14 days of my life. Pain I never felt, sickness and things I’ve never felt before, and I wouldn’t want to ever again. I think that’s why I’ve stayed off of narcotics because that feeling I remember of coming off of them. On day 15 I remember my younger brother offering me a joint and I was mortified. I was like, whoa, how dare you!”
Yeah, the recovery movement. They really were not very pro-cannabis. In fact, I dropped out because they weren’t. I was in an addiction. I was going back to school to become an addiction counselor and they passed around this magazine with marijuana on the front of it like it was the worse thing, and I was sitting there and I had just started using. I felt so guilty and it was helping me and I was getting off meds and I was like, I can’t do this. I can’t get off.
“I get it. I was mortified. And then you know what, I did it because what was the other option? I was so sick, I was so sick, and all of a sudden I feel better, and how do we get more of this stuff? You know? So here I am. I work at the hospital. I’m using my younger brother to go buy me marijuana, you know, like, mortifying, but then I started to realize this is going to help. This is going to be the thing that helps me. And it started to help me and then I started to want to help other people. I got a job at a Suboxone clinic and I wanted to help people. I just thought that I could save the world. Then I started to realize I’m drug testing these patients. They are coming back positive for THC and the doc says, ‘that’s okay, Danny. No big deal. They come back something else that’s a problem.’ And I’m thinking why is this not legal? Why aren’t we just using it? Why can’t we give them weed because here I am… I’m smoking cannabis every day. It’s helping me stay clean, function with my disease, I’m treating these patients, and I’m hiding the fact that I probably smell like it. They thought it was them. It’s me the whole time.”
“Then you know what I got pregnant and there was no more I could hide it. There was no more of ‘I had to be quiet about it’ because Harley Rose, in 2015, early on, started to show symptoms of something and nobody knew what it was. But one day I went into her crib, she was stiff as a board. I picked her up and she was very hard, and her joints were very red and she had a fever of 102 and I knew right at that moment that I had genetically passed down something to her. It was the worst day of my life. I just thought everything was like flashing. Everything I had gone through and I blamed… I blame myself. Her pediatrician was great. Quickly after the test they found out she had A.S. And right then it was like a whiplash.”
“I was very angry at this point, more at myself. I think Because I just felt like this is all my fault. I gave this to her my child’s gonna have to endure all the same things I have. So I was very scared and then like I said it was like a slide. they just wanted ‘Let’s do this. Let’s do that.’ And I said ‘let’s do none of it! What can I do herbally?”
“The doctors were not supportive of anything alternative. And about a week went by from the diagnosis and I was sitting, probably on a Friday and watching her and her body, she just hurt. You could tell, and I didn’t know what to do. And I had a prescription for pain medication and I was holding it and I just knew, I just knew I couldn’t do it. And within days, you know, we had quit our jobs. We had packed our home up and we had found a place in West Baldwin, Maine. And we didn’t have any jobs here. We didn’t have anything, only the hopes that somebody was going to help my daughter. And we left. We met Dr. Dustin.”
“I probably sounded like a lunatic. You know, I just said ‘please, I know you’re not accepting new patients. I need you to help.’ And within probably 24 hours, 48 hours, there was a callback. We had an appointment within days. We went in and I was terrified because still at this point didn’t want to give her the cannabis. I don’t know. I thought maybe this guy was just going to be able to give her an herbal. I don’t know what I thought. Honestly, I don’t know what I was doing or what I thought. I was so scared. He was so wonderful. He was like this white light come over us and we started her on cannabis and she started to do things you’ve never done before. I’ll never forget the day she took off running, jumped on the arm of the couch and Ninja flips.”
“And I thought, ‘do it again!’ My sisters would look at me and give me that look like ‘you shouldn’t be letting your baby do that.’ But I did I let her do things that maybe you shouldn’t have done.”
“I thought, maybe she’d been trapped, you know. So at that moment, the stigma for myself, you know, here I was, it was helping me but I still was scared to give it to my child. Then I gave it to her. She’s remarkable.”
“That’s when it was like, game on, world! Because if I’m doing everything, teach me how to grow, teach me how to grow cannabis, teach me how to do everything about cannabis.”
“And then I started to help one mom, and then that started to be two moms. And then it just really grew. And I never connected my business name with who I was as a mom helping these women. You know, I never wanted it to be combined. Now I have moms that I helped years ago say to me, ‘did you own this company back then?’ And I’ll laugh because, yeah, I did. But I just wanted them to know I was just like them. I just remember having nobody. I had nobody here. I was so depressed. I had left my mom, my sisters. I was a brand new mom myself. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have that. We were hours away from everybody we knew.”
We also opened up about the transitions that had to be made because of COVID19. Some of the questions we discussed were, ‘What has been the biggest challenge in the recent Coronavirus? How have you guys gotten through?’ Sounds like they are pretty well versed in their own, boosting their immune system and all the things that we can do.
“To be honest, I was terrified at first. Right at the beginning of it happening she had an EG to go into. We had tests like back to back. And some things that we had to go. So all of a sudden, they were kind of saying ‘you can come if you want to,’ but I’m watching the news, I’m terrified. I kept her inside completely. We couldn’t stop working, sadly. But we would protect herself as much as we could. We change our clothes outside. We would shower right when we came in, but I mean, she still had to go to doctors. So if she was really going to get it anywhere, it would probably be from there.”
Danielle really highlighted something that is important to me and it’s just like the connection that she has with what she’s doing and everything in her life. It seems like she kind of found her purpose and passion. I asked her ‘How do you see the future with your business? Any challenges so far?’
She gladly mentioned how strangers have impacted her life and helped her gather her strength in the hardest times.
“I just honestly want to help people. I just have to. I feel like if anything, my disease, my illness, my daughter’s illness. If it was given to us for any other reason, it’s totally because we can someway change somebody else’s life.”
I think going through something like that where you’re in a situation that really can’t be changed, it presents challenges that are really hard to endure by yourself, it changes you in ways that your whole purpose and meaning kind of shift. I think I’m coming to that kind of conclusion a lot later in life. But you can’t second guess that you go through what you go through to grow through or whatever cliche you want to use, but, I think it puts things in perspective when you look back and I think about the things that didn’t work out and what was down the road that made more sense and kind of brought things together. I can just relate to that. It’s about trying to help my kids and help other people that are just trapped in these disease situations where they feel there’s no choice but pharma pharma, you know, locked in.
“It’s really sad. I just had a scan done a month ago. They came in I had just had days ago, and they said, like, ‘Danny, there’s 13 new fractures. You have to stop being stubborn and we have to get in there and we got to go operate.’ I’m the worst patient ever on work. But he says to me, ‘I gave you a drug screen. And you really did only test positive for cannabis.’ I start laughing so hard. I go, ‘did you think I was lying?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know. Yeah, kinda because I thought …How is it that you’re functioning like you are.’ I kind of laughed, but I sent him, ‘I hope this is a learning experience for you that all I have in my system is cannabis. And here you are as a doctor saying, I should not be functioning without narcotics and you thought I was lying.’ And I said, ‘I’ll give you a deal if you want to start smoking cannabis,’ and he started laughing. It’s like that was a learning lesson. How dare you first of all drug test me, I told you I didn’t take drugs. I smoke weed, you know. But you know what? That moment I didn’t get mad about it because I hope the next patient he sees he’s run out of options for that person. He’s putting them morphine, and there’s nothing that’s helping. Maybe something click that says I met this girl one time, that’s way worse than you and all she did was smoke cannabis or eat cannabis and one life can be changed from what he saw.”
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Thank you, Amora Correa, for your awesome job writing this blog! We are thankful to have her as part of our team.