New Jersey Monthly November 2014
Jennie Stormes sounded exhausted. She was sitting in a private room in the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit at Hackensack University Medical Center, where her 15-year-old son, Jackson—known to all as Jax—was trying to sleep. Interviewed by phone, she described her son’s lifetime of suffering. Jax’s moans of pain could be heard in the background.
Jax began having seizures when he was four months old. Eventually, he was diagnosed with Dravet syndrome, a severe, rare, genetic form of early-onset epilepsy.
A few days before this latest hospital trip, Stormes had made the difficult decision to move from the picturesque Warren County town of Hope to Colorado, where she can get readier access to the medical marijuana she says Jax needs to control his seizures.
Joanna Buffum 