He had a brain tumour and a year to live. It was the thing that had kept him even, and the hospital would not let it through the door.
Her father was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1999 and given about a year. He went straight into hospital. She knew immediately what he was going to be without.
"My first thought was, I need to get him his cannabis. Like, his joints. Because he needs his joints. That's what he did all the time."
She tried.
"I almost got arrested trying to bring it into the hospital many times. Because I was like, my dad needs — you know, he's dying. Why can't we just give this to him?"
She had not worked out what it was doing for him until it was gone.
"He was probably self-medicating for depression, anxiety, everything else that was going on in his life. I realised he needed that so badly, and he suffered."
Then the sentence she lands on, which is not about the drug at all.
"It was sad, because I thought he was dying a scared man."
He had left when she was very young, and he had always used it. She grew up not registering it as anything.
"I thought it was normal, because I didn't see it as anything else."
She remembers the moment the state tried to tell her otherwise, and how completely it failed.
"When I think I was eight years old, the school had an assembly and they burned a cannabis wafer. And it was something that smelled like cannabis, to tell us kids never to go around a smell like this."
It did not take.
"It still didn't click with me, because what my dad was doing was just him smoking, like he smoked cigarettes."
Later they used together, which she found harder to explain than to do.
"But it was like a secret. I did it with my friends. But how many friends do you tell, my dad and I get high together?"
Her name is not the one on the programme. She says so first, before anything else.
"I am actually Heidi Hill. But that is my maiden and true name. In the cannabis industry, everyone knows me as Heidi Whitman, which was my married name."
Before cannabis she was a veterinary technician in South Florida, and then she was walking dogs.
"I lived down in South Florida, where there was a disposable income society, and there were people that were getting animals and not really doing what they should do with them — which is exercise, and allow them to be dogs."
She started in 2006 and worked it like a trade.
"I did probably 14, 16 hour days for years."
It reached nine hundred clients. She sold it to a veterinarian, and she says it is still running.
The thing that changed her was one of her own animals.
"During that time I utilised plant medicine for one of my dogs that was not well, and that opened up my eyes to options. Because I was trained in typical pharmaceuticals for veterinary care."
She moved to the UK for a relationship and found a country with no opinions yet.
"It was so much of a blank slate."
She was, briefly, a local curiosity.
"I was definitely deemed the CBD lady, like at the gym in my little village neighbourhood."
In November 2018 the UK rescheduled cannabis for medical use, and she started a CBD company for people and pets.
She also started teaching, which is what she still does.
"There was massive fear factor in 18, but then it started to become more of a curiosity. And I liked the fact I could start educating people."
She names the misunderstanding she meets most.
"They all think they're going to get high. They all are panicking."
And she is precise about why.
"They might have had a bad experience. Maybe purchasing something on the street got them too stoned. People can think they're having a heart attack if they have too much THC in their system."
So she began where the fear is not.
"I really went forward on the non-psychoactive part, by just introducing CBD."
The first room was a yoga class. The second was a pub outside her village, because it was the place that would have her.
"They said, you can talk about whatever you want here."
She brought clinicians. Vaporisers, because prescribed flower in the UK may not be smoked.
"I brought all the people from the clinics, had experts in to talk to the local women."
She treats her own family with what she advocates, and she is direct about the arrangement.
"I have a mother with dementia, and the reason why she's in my home and not in a nursing home is so that I can treat her with micro doses of mushrooms, plant-based medicines. And she has a cannabis prescription. Because I can't do that in a public nursing home."
The other animal in the story is a horse.
"I have a 34-year-old horse. He should not even be walking. But we had given him cannabis, to see him be able to go out every day in his fields and do his thing."
Riding is the thing she does that is not work.
"It's my church. It's my happiness. I can forget about everything else when I ride my horses. Because if you're on a thousand pound animal, you can't start thinking about something else. You have to focus."
She founded a women's organisation because of a room she walked into and a woman she lost.
"I went to my very first capital investment forum. I was the only woman in a couple of suits. And I was like, where are my hippies at?"
She describes what being the only one was actually for.
"I was continually being battered by C-suites of men, used as a dog and pony show for board meetings. They bring me in because I'm passionate and I can eloquently explain how it works to those who might not understand."
"And I thought, why am I by myself?"
The woman who changed that was Hannah Deacon.
"She was one of the women that inspired me to start thinking about finding others."
So she and Rebecca Allen-Tapp built one, and called it the EmpowHer Cannabis Society. The recruiting method was not sophisticated.
"We did a networking event. We literally signed up every woman that walked by. We're like — who are you? Where are you?"
It is now a formal association, based in Berlin, with a legal and ethical committee for members who run into trouble.
She is unsentimental about the arithmetic.
"We're still a minority. We're still about 20%. Like last night, there were probably maximum 20 women at an event with about 150 men."
What she wants changed is not a law.
"Cannabis right now socially is accepted as a low class thing. People believe it's stoners, it's people on the corners selling. It's actually the opposite — Class A that are being utilised all throughout London. The upper echelon are focusing on this, like, illegal drug."
"But we actually have a legal way of getting balance in our lives that's on the bottom. So I kind of want to flip that."
On potency she wants the industry to reverse rather than advance.
"I think we have to go back to our roots — literally, no pun intended. Go back to the genetics that began and put those back in the market, because they're stabilised, they haven't been touched. They're purpose-bred."
"Please stabilise what we're putting out there."
The last thing she raises is the thing she says nobody asks about.
"Females — we're not even researched."
She has a specific example of it being done properly, and it is a study rather than a slogan.
"One of my clients has already done a pharmacokinetic study on their formulation for endometriosis symptoms. That was a true study done on women, to create a woman's drug for endometriosis — which is underdiagnosed, and people suffer every day."
Her argument for why it matters is commercial before it is moral.
"If a business is creating products for women without women making decisions on those products, without researching women's bodies — we're failing."
And the version of the industry she wants is defined by who it fails to reach.
"Those with Parkinson's might not be able to swallow. Maybe we do something topical. People with Alzheimer's might not want to eat. Maybe we do dissolvable. We need to find things that are going to actually service the demographics across the board."