The date is June 3, 2005, and it’s a Friday night in Millcreek, Utah. Brandon Voorhees, a 25-year-old resident and Utah native is driving his Jeep Wrangler with his dog riding co-pilot. The top is down, the stars are shining, and the cool summer breeze is blowing through he and his furry friend’s hair. Life is good – and it should be.
Voorhees isn’t stoked because it’s pay day. He’s feeling eager about life because he just successfully proposed to his girlfriend, Emily, and the two are going to build a life together. First, he needs to pick up celebratory milkshakes at Shivers before getting home to his beautiful bride fiance.
It all happened so quickly, Voorhees recalls during an interview with Salt Baked City 17-years later. He can remember driving West on 3300 South towards 2100 East, and suddenly there was a white flash, followed by a lot of violence and noise – and then everything went black.
Voorhees and his dog had collided with a Ford Bronco and they both were ejected from the vehicle. Miraculously, like a cat, the dog landed on its feet safely and ran the remaining 28 blocks home. Voorhees, who took the brunt of the fall on his head and shoulder wasn’t so lucky.
The injured young man was rushed to the University of Utah Intensive Care Unit (ICU) by ambulance where they began repairing two epidural hematomas with surgery. Those injuries are a traumatic accumulation of blood that gathers between the inner table of the skull and the stripped-off dural membrane on the brain.
He also broke a shoulder blade and a few vertebrae in his neck. Doctor’s also discovered during an MRI he was leaking CT fluid from his sinus cavity where there was a fracture in his forehead. Voorhees was in bad shape.
During emergency surgery he had 16 titanium screws and eight straps inserted to hold the damaged section of his skull together. Like most who suffer a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Voorhees fell into a coma and the outcome was still very uncertain.
Doctors at the U of U hospital warned Emily and her fiancé’s family that they needed to be prepared for the worst when dealing with a TBI this severe. There was a strong possibility that Voorhees wasn’t going to remember them, or even who he was after waking. At worst, he might remain in a vegetive state for the rest of his life.
The news from doctors didn’t discourage Emily, or her soon to be in-laws. Instead, they sat by his hospital bed day-in-and-day-out. Sadly, there wasn’t anything else they could do but pray for the best outcome possible.
Their prayers wouldn’t be answered until three days later when Voorhees would wake up from his coma in the ICU. Amazingly, he first asked for his fiancé, and then instantly worried he’d been fired from his job for not showing up.
“All of a sudden, I was opening my eyes and I was in the hospital bed,” said Voorhees. “It was the scariest moment of my life when everything sank in, and I realized I had lost three days of my life. I just couldn’t comprehend where the time went to, and it terrified me.”
Voorhees would remain in the hospital for eight days until being sent home with his family. Days before he left his hospital bed, he asked his grandmother for a favor. He wanted to propose to the woman he loved, again, and this time have the celebration they missed out on the day of the accident.
Covered in bandages and barely able to move, Voorhees crouched down on one knee with his grandmother’s wedding ring in hand, and he re-asked Emily to spend the rest of her life with him in front of family and friends. Emily said, “Yes.”
Leaving the hospital and eager to begin planning a wedding and get back to life, the couple had no idea the real battle had yet to come. Although he suffered in total skull and facial fractures, scapular (shoulder blade) fractures, two broken vertebrae, and a severe TBI – it wasn’t the injuries he had to worry about anymore. Surprisingly, it was the medications he was prescribed that would hurt him in ways he couldn’t imagine.
The next four years of his life were spent in monthly doctor visits and an endless amount of prescription trials to get a grip on the pain that plagued his life. Voorhees mostly suffered from extreme facial pain and frequent migraines during this time, but he claims this is when the mental anguish of living with a TBI began – and why other prescriptions started entering the equation.
Voorhees can remember starting every day of his life with a handful of pills for breakfast during those years. Instead of the usual eggs, toast, juice, or anything nutritious to start his day – Voorhees was eating prescriptions like Gabapentin, Cymbalta, Xanax, Amitriptyline, and Percocet to fuel his day. More importantly, he said the drugs gave him the courage to face it too. The drugs completely killed his appetite, and he felt dependent on them at the same time.
“I would start the day with sometimes five pills in the morning,” Voorhees said. “Then I would take a few in the afternoon and more at night to sleep. Sometimes I wouldn’t eat until later in the day, if at all. The routine that was supposed to be helping me was slowly killing me. I was losing control and I needed to make a change.”
According to WebMD, the five most abused prescription drugs in America are OxyContin, Xanax, Ambien, Nembutal, and Adderall. This wide-ranging group of prescription pills contains opioids used for pain, benzodiazepine used for anxiety, sedative-hypnotic used as a sleeping aid, and central nervous system stimulants used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Voorhees was on most of these at one point or another. His only original symptom was pain.
“It was a really rough time in my life for my family and I,” Voorhees says. “I was learning to cope with sleeplessness and constant pain, I wasn’t eating anymore, and it really started to affect how I was as a person. My life really consisted of being screwed up on medications all the time and trying to deal with the side effects that came with them. I was a wreck – I mean just an absolute wreck.”
Today, Voorhees is a 42-year-old father of four and still happily married to Emily. He admits that he is lucky his family is still around after what he put them through though.
Voorhees says he was taking an abundance of prescriptions just to help with the side-effects from the other pills. At one point, he was prescribed a total of 15 different medications to curb his daily pain. More than half of those prescriptions he admits were used to help with medication side-effects and mental angst. The strong side-effects even prevented the father from being alone with his children while medicated, and that devastated him.
So, a Utah Medical Cannabis patient reading this like yourself might be asking, “Why doesn’t Brandon Voorhees just try some cannabis already?”
Well, most of Voorhees’ recovery time was long before Utah started discussing legalizing medical cannabis in the state. States like California, Colorado, and Washington had begun adult-use legalization in 2016, but those living in the Behave State were far from legal cannabis and the risk to bring it home was still high.
During a trip to California, Voorhees was experiencing a withdrawal after a medication switch and the torturous event lead him into a dispensary for relief. This was his first time going inside a legal cannabis store and he says this was when his life began to change for the better.
“Access to cannabis that day saved my life,” Voorhees said. “It wasn’t just access to cannabis, I couldn’t believe the selection they had. I was able to really dial down the products that I needed specifically, and it helped dramatically. I wasn’t able to do that in Utah yet. My whole medication routine started to change after that trip.”
His family was always against cannabis, so it was a risky path to take and one that would require a lot of convincing when he got home.
Instead of hiding it from his parents like he used to, he now uses cannabis to help survive the injuries he sustained in his accident. It took some convincing, but his LDS family – who once had a police officer confiscate his bong during high school – are now warming up to the idea of him getting “high.”
Voorhees says his family was worried if he got “high” on cannabis, it would be a gateway to other more harsher drugs. In reality, it was letting the young man avoid the 15 other highly addictive medications prescribed by doctors that was eroding his life.
“My doctor was prescribing me 60 Percocet a month during that time,” Voorhees said. “I couldn’t leave the house without having at least 25 in my pocket just to feel comfortable. Sometimes insurance or other reasons would cause my medications to get switched and the side-effects would make my life hectic. My family really hung in there and some days I’m surprised they did.”
Now, Voorhees only relies on cannabis flower, vapes, edibles, and topicals to get through his day. That’s thanks to becoming a Utah medical cannabis patient when the program first began in 2020. Legal cannabis in Utah also helped convince his family he was making a smart and a healthy decision when treating his TBI injuries.
“I’ll usually start my day with an inhalant (flower or vape) and morning coffee,” Voorhees said. “I then apply some topicals (salve) to the parts of my body that are hurting and head into work. Some afternoons I need a little more cannabis than others, but for the most part I consume at night, and it helps me sleep better than Ambien can. It’s a much healthier routine than before.”
Voorhees admits his body was still busted before making the switch to legal cannabis and the quality of his life has dramatically improved now that he’s off the prescriptions. The only thing he takes besides medical cannabis is the occasional ibuprofen.
“So yeah, I live with a lot of pain, and yeah, I have all these problems to deal with, and I don’t like sounding prideful, and I don’t like to boast at all, but in a way I feel stronger because of it all,” Voorhees said. “I have to be, right? That’s why I want to share my story with as many people as I can. There are so many people who are taking these medications and they’re just waiting to die, and they’re not living anymore. Cannabis has brought a lot of joy and happiness back into my life, and I know others can do the same.”
