A woman who experienced the horrors of ‘scromiting’ has shared her experience as a warning to other weed smokers.
Sydni Collins, 23, had been hitting a weed pen on most days since she’d turned 16, but found that she’d begun experiencing some pretty unpleasant symptoms.
She was experiencing scromiting – a particularly unpleasant side effect that some weed smokers have begun to fall victim to.
What is ‘scromiting’?
People have been turning up at the emergency room in increasing numbers suffering with severe stomach pain that is so painful it leaves them screaming in agony.
Often, these attacks can occur a few times each year, and both the patients and the doctors aren’t exactly sure why.
When these attacks hit, they can leave the patients feeling extreme nausea, in great abdominal pain, and vomiting severely.
The cause behind this is a condition called cannabis hyperemesis syndrome (CHS), according to the Cleveland Clinic.
The symptoms can continue for days, and commonly occur within a day of cannabis use, and can be so severe that some staff in ER have nicknamed the condition ‘scromiting’ because it is a combination of screaming and vomiting.
‘Scromiting’ so extreme that she was hospitalized for a month
Collins revealed her own experience with scromiting, which left her needing to be hospitalized for a month and fed through a feeding tube.
She described being so violently ill during a flight in the spring break of her senior year that she could not stop vomiting.
Collins told the New York Post: “There were some days when it lasted until noon and I would not go to school because of how bad it was.
“I would be puking all morning. I would let out yells or cries because nothing would come out. I was just dry heaving.”
She did not get a diagnosis on her first visit to the hospital, but found she was struggling to eat a full meal even once the worst of the symptoms subsided, leaving her visiting the ER seven times in one month.
The symptoms persisted intermittently, leaving her unable to eat properly for weeks on end, with some days being “fine” and others where she was unable to eat or leave the house, before being struck down with vomiting and stomach pain again.
Collins explained: “When I was finally admitted, [doctors] told me I was 87 pounds and had to get a feeding tube. They said, ‘This is not normal, we need to figure it out.’”
She tried hot baths for relief but they only added to her dehydration, and she struggled to return to a healthy weight as she found it hard to stomach most foods, even nutritional supplements or Gatorade.
She explained: “I would chew on ice cubes. I would lick the salt off pretzel rods. Cold washcloths helped.
“But 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.”
She was initially misdiagnosed with superior mesenteric artery syndrome, a rare digestive disorder, while other patients often get misdiagnoses of food poisoning or stomach flu.
Dan McGovern, another patient who experienced scromiting, told the outlet he was misdiagnosed with gastroesophageal reflux disease at 20 after having used concentrate wax, a highly potent form of marijuana, every day as a teenager.
The 34-year-old explained: “When I was consuming a lot of the concentrates, I would wake up with severe nausea that went on for a while.
“I would start getting cold sweats. It just got even worse. I would wake up every morning and just start throwing up and involuntarily yelling during the dry heaving.”
It got so severe that he struggled to even keep water down, after which it was finally determined that the cannabis he was consuming was too much for his body, to the point it was “rejecting” it.
While the exact cause of CHS is unknown, it is believed that it could be down to the long-term overstimulation of receptors in the endocannabinoid system, which disrupts the body’s control of nausea and vomiting, per the Cleveland Clinic.
After being hospitalized for a month, Collins stopped weed for around nine months until she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease.
She then began to wonder whether the scromiting was actually a byproduct of Crohn’s 0 which causes inflammation of the digestive tract – rather than the cannabis, and began using again.
Unfortunately, like many people who experience scromiting, Collins was struck down again after using the drug.
She revealed: “I started doing [weed] again, and three years from my first big episode, I had another one and went to the hospital a bunch of times. [I] ended up having to get a feeding tube and lost a bunch of weight again.”
Collins revealed that her second hospitalization led to her finally quitting cannabis altogether two years ago, explaining: “The only way to figure out if [my symptoms] were from weed is if I stopped. So I did, and I got better.”
