Substance Abuse

In my current prac I am involved with pulmonary rehabilitation. As you would suspect most of the patients that I see are quite elderly and have smoked for most of their lives. There are however the minority of patients who have not smoked and are just unlucky enough to suffer from a pulmonary condition. Many of these patients would benefit from a lung transplant, however it is extremely hard to get on the transplant list let alone be lucky enough to get the transplant.

One of the patients that I see is a middle aged woman who requires a lung transplant to prolong her life. She appears to have very different values to myself, she is very loud and upfront and has many opinions that she insists on expressing. She does not spend time on her physical appearance and she doesn’t refrain from using coarse language around anyone. She openly talks about her many, many years of substance abuse and even told me that she used to drive her kids around whilst intoxicated.

I find her slightly confronting and have to try and maintain a professional image whilst communicating with her. She tells me that she is about to be placed on the transplant list if she can add a further 1Kg of weight to her tiny frame. This angers me as I believe there are far more deserving patients who would benefit from a transplant. I have to try and curb my personal feelings and still treat her as any other patient but I find this difficult and wonder if anyone else has any ideas about how to manage the situation.

I will continue to approach this sort of situation with a professional mind set and forget about the causes of a patient’s illness, and rather focus on the person that presents at the time.