By Tan Su Ming
I spend much time telling my patients to quit smoking, eat healthier, start exercising, learn to relax, and enjoy life. I suspect most of us do so, and with limited success.
The Girlfriend from Hell
I love it when my patients have an Aha! moment.
I met a twenty-year-old man who had a cough he couldn’t shake. We got to talking about his smoking habit. He’d smoked his first cigarette when he was twelve and he was smoking twenty a day now.
“You ever thought of quitting?” I asked.
“Sure,” he replied, “but it’s very hard. “
The cigarette was like his girlfriend from hell, I told him. This girlfriend would take everything from him — his health and his money, and give him nothing good in return. If he tried to break up with her, she wasn’t going to let him go so easily.
“Exactly,” he said. “Damned hard to break up with this girlfriend of mine.”
“What is your girlfriend’s name?” I asked.
“Winston”, he smiled, not missing a beat.
Commentary
After twenty-odd years of talking about quitting cigarettes with smokers, I now realise that I don’t know what they go through, being a non-smoker myself. I am convinced about the detrimental effects of cigarette smoking, and I think smokers are, too. But I have read that because nicotine feeds the pleasure centre of the brain, quitting cigarettes in some can be harder than kicking heroin. I try not to pontificate any more these days. I just say if you can, don’t smoke any more.
How you do it is not important, I tell them. If you can find a good Why to quit, the How is not so important.
In the drawing, a doctor tells a patient he needs to quit because he has had a stroke, an amputation and a heart attack. The patient’s wife and daughter react with joy when the man says that he has. Actually, the fellow continues to clutch on to his cigarette but keeps it out of sight of his family.
—Dr Tan Su-Ming
Tan Su-Ming has been a general practitioner in solo practice in the heartlands for over twenty years. She believes that if we knew everyone’s back story, we would be kind to everyone.
The commentary and vignette were reproduced with permission from the book “Being Human, Stories from Family Medicine” edited by Cheong Pak Yean and Ong Chooi Peng and published in 2021 by the College of Family Physicians Singapore. Pictures of illness experiences were drawn by NUS medical students in workshops conducted from 2012-2017 by A/Prof Cheong Pak Yean. Senior family physicians subsequently shared vignettes and commentaries based on the pictures
