A REHABILITATED woman previously using illegal substance sat on the chair for counseling. I started the conversation by asking how she is. In a low voice, she said “I feel as if I am not a significant person in the society.”

I wonder why after nine months of rehabilitation, she still finds her life fragmented and desolated. But from her words, I realized that her personhood was detached, the humanity was already gone. And then I asked myself, how can I turn her vulnerability into an authentic and a whole experience again? As a nurse, what roles should I play to fulfill her needs? Do nurses need to revisit their definition in this whole new landscape of treatment and care? If so, am I truly doing nursing as caring?

For women who are into drug abuse, nurses play an important role to help them regain their desolated state and attain the authentic wholeness.

There are so many problems afflicting women who are involved in drugs including work, parenting, and relationships. The causes of women’s drug addiction varies. Some experience physical and sexual abuses, peer pressures, and childhood traumas.

I feel that nurses are essential in the substance user’s journey to recovery. And because women are vulnerable and have special care needs, nurses then have to address women’s caring needs. They have to be vigilant and their caring skills should be taken as their strength in safeguarding caring values. They have to be in authority to promote patients’ health and alleviate their sufferings.

Women drug victims should be educated that their stabilization will demand a day to day process of building, repairing, and rehabilitating treatment and also social help. It will include a trial and error and failure can even occur sometimes due to relapse.

Relapses can happen due to noncompliance to treatment both for men and women. It may be due to lack of funds or sometimes when the person thinks they are already well and would no longer need rehabilitation, they fall short of the treatment.

Am I truly doing nursing as caring? I guess I am. It is just that drug addiction is a chronic illness and caring cannot bring back a woman’s total personhood in just a snap. Caring is nurturing – a process that requires time and unconditional efforts.