by Gary A. Aumiller, PH.D.\u00a0 ABPP<\/span><\/p>\n This story is told with the permission and review of my patient, John.<\/span><\/p>\n John is a retired cop, one year younger than I am.\u00a0 He is pale white sometimes and other times he looks remarkably normal.\u00a0 Sometimes he looks weak, sometimes like the man that plays golf a couple of times a week in retirement.\u00a0 He is well-liked by most everyone that comes in contact with him.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cSo why are you here?\u00a0 I assume you didn\u2019t come in for a golf lesson.\u201d\u00a0 I am not the greatest golfer.\u00a0 I had known this man from police golf tournaments.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI need a liver doc.\u00a0 My brother and sister are both willing to give me part of their livers but the hospital in the city won\u2019t do the operation because I failed a blood test.\u201d\u00a0 (A quarter of a liver from someone else will regenerate and handle the functionality of natural liver.\u00a0 Live donors are the way to go in liver transplants these days).<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t know you could fail a blood test, John!\u201c<\/span><\/p>\n But, this test he failed.\u00a0 What he was saying was he had drunk the night before he was going for final preparations for a liver transplant. \u00a0He celebrated with a couple of glasses of wine, which gave him a bad reading on a surprise blood test and they decided the operation wasn\u2019t worth the risk if he was going to drink.\u00a0 They said they would re-consider him if he got help and he was still around after 8-10 months.<\/span><\/p>\n A race against time to save a life.\u00a0 The Model for End-Stage Liver Disease Test (MELD) <\/strong>is a test which is used for telling when someone needs a liver transplant.\u00a0 It was in the mid to upper 20\u2019s with a 50% plus mortality rate in the year.\u00a0 His liver was shot.\u00a0 There was a good chance he would die within the year.\u00a0 He essentially was on the down cycle.<\/span><\/p>\n Why would someone drink when their liver was about to be replaced?\u00a0 I asked the staff from Marworth Treatment Center, an alcohol and drug rehab in Pennsylvania with a first responder program used by many departments in the east. \u00a0They responded that\u2019s what they mean when they talk about the insanity in the Second Step of AA.\u00a0 When people are taking a drug like alcohol that they know will eventually kill them, that is insanity.\u00a0 The Second step for AA is to trust that a power greater than themselves can restore them to \u201csanity.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0I guess it was just never pointed out with such an obvious case.<\/span><\/p>\n So, John started treatment.\u00a0 We worked on ceasing his drinking and getting a better sense of who he was as a sober man.\u00a0 We worked on a variety of relapse prevention techniques to keep him \u201con the wagon.\u201d\u00a0 We hand selected videos for him to watch that covered topics from Mindfulness during Treatment, to Recovery from Trauma and Alcohol, to Staying Motivated, to the Father Martin videos on the 12 Steps, forgiveness and relapse.\u00a0 I sent him off to meetings.\u00a0 We talked about the horrific things he saw and experienced in his career.\u00a0 We also did 96-hour urine test once a week.\u00a0 Our goal was to build a paper trail of his treatments so that the next place he interviewed would see him as a man in recovery.\u00a0 The battle cry was \u201cfocus on the goal of a new liver.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I also prayed for him as I do for many of my patients.\u00a0 Never underestimate the power of prayer.<\/span><\/p>\n A funny thing happened.\u00a0 In the process of \u201ctherapy for a liver,\u201d my patient absorbed the material and lost his desire to drink.\u00a0 He was never one to turn down a beer or two, but he learned that his choir practices and social drinking had built up and taken a toll.\u00a0 In fact, he learned that the toll may be different for him than it is for others who drank the same amount as he did.\u00a0 He may just be prone to problems more than his colleagues.<\/span><\/p>\n He has another hospital willing to evaluate him for a liver and his appointment is soon.\u00a0 His medical information is all in order and we will see what happens.\u00a0 But he got his new MELD Score from the physician who referred him for a new liver initially and his number was down to 12.\u00a0 We were shocked when the scores came in.\u00a0 Just by learning about himself in psychotherapy for four months and working in a positive direction, he got a lot better and his liver did too.\u00a0 He looked at me and said \u201cI feel better, doc, I physically feel better.\u201d\u00a0 His doctor told him he may be denied a liver again, this time because he is not a candidate for a transplant with a MELD score in that range.<\/span><\/p>\n