Tales from a life of battling pain—physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. I’ve faced it all. Now, my purpose is to turn my experience into a roadmap to healing for others.
The host opens with a friendly July 1 greeting, explains a pivot in plans, and asks viewers to check in about physical, mental, and spiritual pain. This section sets the theme for considering small changes or additions to improve wellbeing.
Suggestions include walking, stretching, sauna, and cold plunges as ways to counter pain and stagnation, along with a discussion about balancing rest and activity. The host describes recovering from ruptured appendix surgery and regaining pain-free movement to illustrate the benefits of reintroducing movement.
The speaker recounts childhood back and ACL injuries, negative experiences with opioid pain pills, and the first meaningful encounter with cannabis during rehab. He explains how cannabis helped him distinguish helpful 'good' pain from harmful overdoing and aided his recovery mindset.
From junior hockey seasons to adulthood, the host explains how cannabis became a reliable tool for pain control, creativity, and reducing anxiety, while noting periods of moderation. He also notes cultural shifts like legalization and occasional planned breaks to rebalance.
Now healed from recent surgery and aiming for big goals, the host decides to pause cannabis use to channel energy into new habits and productivity. He encourages action to combat anxiety, suggests trying new routines, and closes with motivational advice for the second half of the year.
Good morning and happy Wednesday, Cadre. I had full intention of being outside and showing some of the stretches that I like to do to really help my body and mind. But it's been raining a little bit all morning, so had to pivot from the plan and come inside and talk to you about something else. And it being July 1st, the official halfway point of the year, I thought it might be good to just do a check-in and see how you're feeling, right? Like, do you have pain? Where is the pain? Is it physical?
Is it moving around? Is it isolated somewhere? Are you pain free or is it hard to get out of bed? Is this maybe a mental emotional or spiritual thing that's holding you back and it being a halfway point, maybe today is a good opportunity to start something new, make a little change, slight adjustment, little tweak. Maybe it's just an addition, right? Maybe you're doing a great job and you're like, what am I missing? What can I add? Well, what I think that you could add if you're looking for something is just some sort of, some type of movement, whether it's going for a walk in the morning, stretching, sauna, cold plunge.
Those are some of my favorite things to just get the body going. Because if I'm feeling stuck in any way, shape or form or in pain, movement is always the cure. A lot of times you get feedback where it's just like, oh, you just got to rest. Just rest that out. Like no, rest is only good for a period of time. But then you have to move. You have to get up. And I'm getting close to my three month anniversary of my surgery for my ruptured appendix, which was April 9th. And around that two-month time frame, I was getting to the point where I was maybe eclipsing that rest period where I needed to get back into gear a little bit and turn the body on in the form of movement.
And It's been fantastic ever since. I don't have any sort of pains in my body. It's unbelievable. I love that. And now I'm just dialed in and ready to go with my body in a position to perform at its best. So I'll be introducing some new activities into my lifestyle. And I wanted to show you guys that, but won't be able to today. But I am going to talk about, you know, something for like a relationship that I've had with a tool for pain that has served me well for such a long time. But, you know, as I'm going through this change and reevaluating how I spend my time and how I'm just going about my day-to-day, I have decided that I'm going to take a little break from this source.
And the source that I'm talking about is cannabis. And give you a little background of my relationship with cannabis when it comes to pain. And I may have mentioned this in one of the early live streams that I've had. But if you don't know, I'll get a quick Cliff Notes version when I was 11, check from behind on the boards. broke my back, but I didn't know it until three years later when I was running to first base and I collapsed, found out that I had a fractured L5 vertebrae that slid forward, fused itself together, stunted my growth, created compensation patterns that led to an ACL tear a year earlier than that when I was 13.
And when I had that ACL surgery, I had this leg immobilizer that was not very good compared to what hospitals are using today or surgeons are using today for post-surgery. And this surgery that I had was 1997, 13 years old. And went to sleep, I think it was the night after surgery. And I had the pain pills because I just had surgery. And it zonked me out. I'm just this little 13-year-old kid having major surgery. And when I went to sleep, I woke up the next day and this leg immobilizer had shifted a little bit.
And one of the rods to stabilize it that went along the side of my leg was essentially just digging into my quad all night long. And I woke up with this incredibly painful calcium deposit in my quad to the point where if you were to just blow my toes, it would feel like someone was swinging a sledgehammer into my leg. It was awful. And then that led to the doctors giving me more medication, which then led to bloody stool and just pain all around. It didn't feel good. At least the pain pills that they gave me before allowed me to sleep, but this is just making me uncomfortable.
So at that point, just a few days after my ACL surgery, when I was 13, I decided that I did not like pain pills and I did everything I could during my rehab to avoid that. And so I avoided pain pills for the majority of my recovery. I had surgery on November 4th, 1997 and played a full contact hockey game on December 27th. You heard that right. I was super focused on my recovery and maybe that was because I wasn't bogged down with the fogginess of pain pills trying to slow my recovery down. I was able to just be in tune with my body and as a young kid so I was resilient and it worked out pretty good.
Fast forward to playing junior hockey and it's what is this? It's probably like 2003 right now, actually it just turned 2004, playing in playoffs, it's February, or right before playoffs, it's February, and going to check somebody, and then my left knee goes out the same way that my right knee did when I was 13, and I had unfortunately torn my left ACL now. So I drove home on my 19th birthday to come and have my second ACL surgery, and this time I had a different mental approach going into surgery.
I wasn't gonna do the pain pill thing and I was just gonna tough it out. So I had surgery and you know, I took, you have to have pain pills or pain medication while you're having surgery, right out of surgery. So did that, but I was very mindful of what was going on, where my pain was, and then I had some visitors, some of my friends from high school who were going to school at EU and they were casually utilizing marijuana. And I'll never forget, but I started partaking with them and I had this whole new relationship to my body when it came to pain.
It was like I had, it was like we were one and the same. I wasn't fighting it. was, that's when the first time I realized it was providing me information and I was understanding what was bad pain and what was good pain in a sense. And the good pain is pushing through rehabilitation, whereas bad pain is overdoing it. And because I wasn't masked with pain pills, I was very conscious of my movements and of how I was recovering. And I was also going through a period prior to that where I'm driving home on 19th birthday and I'm like, gosh, do I even want to keep playing hockey again?
This is a huge setback while everybody is going into the off season, getting stronger and better. I'm gonna be rehabbing my knee just to get back to normal. So I went through a time period where I was like, gosh, do I even want to keep playing? But when I was utilizing cannabis, it just made me really just think about what I liked. And I realized that I really liked hockey. I loved hockey. And I wasn't gonna let this injury take away 18 years, maybe not 18, let's call it 15. I'll say I started around the age of three.
So 15 years of my whole life was dedicated to this passion, this love that I had. And I wasn't just going to give it up. So I ended up getting my first tattoo, some hockey sticks on my back shoulder. with a goal of putting my college number and college logo on there. So it's like a way to trick myself into saying, no, I am a hockey player. I'm going to go and do this. I'm feeling good. And in my first year at juniors, prior to the ACL surgery, I was playing great. I was having a lot of fun on the ice, but I was really in my head off the ice.
And It was like the first time I had stress and anxiety because I was putting this unnecessary pressure on myself to reach this goal of playing division one hockey and I just wanted it now. And I wasn't as patient as I should have been. And I think it kind of manifested in like I broke out with acne unexplainably. So I feel like stress had a lot to do with that. And when I went back for year #2, I was coming in with this kind of connection to cannabis. And it actually made me have the most fun hockey season I had since, well, I guess it was like a top three favorite hockey season of mine because I had a great time in high school.
But I was playing hockey. I wasn't taking any pain pills and I was like utilizing cannabis in the evenings after playing hockey. And it was like this way to be in tune with my body, understand where my pain was, but also calm down that stress that was driving anxiety in my life. And I was doing everything I wanted to be doing. So why was I, why would I, why would I have anxiety and have a tough time with it, right? So That was kind of an eye opener for me. And in Canada at the time, they were just legalizing cannabis throughout the whole entire country.
So there was a whole different energy behind it than in the US. So from about my 19th birthday through now, I have been a regular cannabis user when it comes to fighting my pain. and essentially tapping into the creative side of what I do as well. And I've taken some breaks throughout that time period, most notably this past September, October, I took like an 8 week just break. Wanted to kind of just get back to homeostasis because I would say too much of anything is never a good thing, even if it's a good thing.
Like you can't just go into your day and have 200 gallons of water and call that good. You need food, you need other nutrients and too much water is not good, right? So you got to find that balance. And when I returned to my cannabis use in the fall, I had a different relationship and I enjoyed that. So and then I went through a really stressful period over the winter and then ended up rupturing my appendix. And now I'm just kind of to the point where my body is healed from my ruptured appendix.
I have so much momentum going on in many categories of life. And it's July 1st, halfway point through the year. I have massive goals over the next six weeks. some of which you're going to be hearing about soon, but I don't want to drop that quite yet. So I'm just going to take a break and I'm going to use this energy to replace it with something good that I haven't been doing as much of. You know, and that's not to say that for me, cannabis slows down my production because I'm a very high functioning individual when it comes to utilizing cannabis.
And I've always kind of used it as a tool to go and do something. There are always those times where it's a tool to just kind of take a break mentally from the grind of life. But right now I feel like I need to be 100% in tune with everything. And I don't want to take any breaks right now. I don't want to grind too much, right? We got to take this slow approach. But sometimes when things are being built into a crescendo, you have to take advantage of that momentum. And that's what I'm doing right now.
So yeah, that's kind of my little bit of background on cannabis and my relationship with it. It's always been a wonderful pain management tool for myself. But just like anything, you have to have balance and you have to understand when it's important to just take a break, start something new, replace a habit or a pastime with something that you've been thinking about but haven't acted on. And go do that. See how that makes you feel. I always say action kills anxiety and if you have any sort of anxiety inside of you, it's trying to tell you something.
So what's it saying? Listen to it. don't tuck it away. Action kills anxiety. So get out there, go do something. It's July 1st. Don't put too much pressure on yourself and do what you can to make the second-half of 2026 the best it can be. So Alright, hope you're all having a fantastic morning. Hope you're gonna have a great rest of your day, and I will look forward to chatting with you soon. Cheers!
