Dad: Pot saved cancer-ridden son's life

MISSOULA, Mont., May 5 (UPI) -- Medical marijuana a Montana father slipped into his 2-year-old cancer-ridden son's feeding tube behind doctors' backs saved the boy's life, the father said.

"It was a godsend," Mike Hyde, 27, a Missoula, Mont., car salesman, said of a homemade marijuana serum he slipped, 3 mm at a time, into son Cash Hyde's feeding tube twice a day after doctors said the boy would likely die.

Two weeks later, Cash -- who had a stage 4 brain tumor surrounding his optic nerve and hadn't eaten for 40 days after getting ultrahigh doses of chemotherapy and was hemorrhaging from the lungs -- was weaned of all the nausea drugs, sitting up, eating again "and laughing," Hyde told ABC News.

He said the doctors at Salt Lake City's Primary Children's Medical Center called his son's recovery "a miracle."

But Hyde's rogue action, while "fascinating," was "somewhat bothersome," a New York doctor and pediatrics professor told the network.

Hyde said he didn't tell Cash's doctors about his homemade remedy because medical marijuana is illegal in Utah although legal in Montana, and he was afraid the doctors would take the marijuana away.

But after Cash's remarkable comeback, with no permanent organ damage, Hyde did tell the surprised doctors what he'd done.

Cash still has a 50 percent to 80 percent chance the cancer will come back, Hyde told ABC.