Clinical Nurse Advisor Kat Boulton shares her medical cannabis journey

Recently, our Clinical Nurse Advisor Kat Boulton spoke with Cannabis Health News about her family’s personal experience with medical cannabis, and on leaving the NHS to help patients access this potentially life changing medication.

Kat started to explore medical cannabis when her own daughter, Marley, was diagnosed with a genetic epilepsy condition at the age of two.

“I started to Google treatments for epilepsy, because you look for anything, the more that I looked, the more evidence I found worldwide, especially for kids with refractory epilepsy.”

“By now she had tried six or seven antiepileptic medications and had various side effects from those. She was still having multiple seizures throughout the day and night. [Cannabis] was something I really wanted for her.”

Kat’s daughter was prescribed medical cannabis during lockdown, in March 2020 and she saw an improvement within a few days.

“Within four or five days we saw an improvement in her balance, she was able to sit up and could walk, although she was unsteady,” she explains.

“Her seizures started to reduce in severity after a couple of weeks and after six weeks, they started to reduce quite dramatically in frequency. She still had one or two a day, but some days she was completely seizure free.”

Now seven, is able to attend school with a support worker and maintain a more normal quality of life.

“The benefits that I’ve seen in my daughter, as a caregiver, are amazing”

“She still has additional needs, she’s autistic which is part of the spectrum of a genetic disorder, but she now lives a more normal life. It allows her to do things like go to school, which has been really good for her quality of life. She’s able to walk and sometimes she even runs so fast you can’t catch her.”

Kat worked on the frontline throughout the height of the coronavirus pandemic, but last year she made the decision to leave the NHS after securing her ideal job, as a clinical nurse advisor with The Medical Cannabis Clinics.

Talking about her role here at The Medical Cannabis Clinics Kat said: 

“I find that there are a lot of patients who are totally naive to cannabis and it’s those who we are there to support through the whole process, because it’s a completely new thing to them. I try to make it tangible, to destigmatise and demystify cannabis as a medicine,” Katrina explains.

“Patients can book an appointment with me any time, even if they are a historical patient, they might have a change of prescription or have side effects they never had before, or have worries about something such as driving or travel.

“I also review their progress, because it’s important for them to reflect on that as a patient and to recognise how far they have come.”

You can read the interview in full over at Cannabis Health News.

If you’re a patient and would like to book an aftercare appointment with Kat, click here.