Janis Hughes lives in Manitoba. She loves travelling, knitting and spending time with her nieces and nephews. And she’s dying. In 2021, Hughes discovered she had terminal breast cancer, with only a 28 per cent chance of surviving the next five years.
Understandably, the news sent her into a serious depression as she contemplated her mortality. “Every time I saw a friend, I wondered if it was our final goodbye,” she writes in a piece for Maclean’s. “My mind was like a gerbil on a wheel, repeating the same phrase over and over again: I’m dying. I’m dying. I’m dying.”
One day, Hughes stumbled on a Netflix documentary about psilocybin, a psychoactive ingredient in certain mushrooms, and its ability to ease distress in end-of-life patients. She applied to Health Canada for permission to use it therapeutically—but the government denied her. In her story for Maclean’s, she writes about her attempts to find solace in psilocybin, and how she finally got the dose of release she was looking for.
—Emily Landau, executive editor
