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7. Clinicians who inspired me Part 1 – published 26.03.2012

By March 2012 I was posting every 2 days on the blog, it’s true that regular writing promotes regular writing and more and more ideas come forwards.

Its just practice.

I had dabbled with the concept of putting another peoples news onto the blog as a ‘newsfeed’ but by this stage I was getting fed up of that and was just happy to write about my own stuff time and time again.

There was a series of 3 blogs about clinicians who inspired me, this is something that I take back often now when I do mock interviews for students at school; either in general, for dentistry, dental students or new graduates.

It seems holey appropriate that almost 5 years on I should re post this one about John Gibson who we have started working with on the Academy. I’m not sure it was the blog that facilitated that but it certainly helped along the way.

At a recent ITI Course at the ITI Centre in Crawley, we were asked to consider and write down some notes about people who have inspired us in our careers. The point of this exercise (this was a mentor training day for ITI mentors) was to try and distill down some of the attributes that we found inspirational and to see if we could develop similar attributes in ourselves for people that we may mentor in implant dentistry.

This got me thinking about people who inspired me through my career and encouraged me to improve myself in my dentistry. I wanted to put down a blog post about 1 or 2 of these guys to tell people how important they have been to me.

The Junior Doctor in Greenock (No name available)

When I was approximately 5 or 6 years old, I slipped on ice on the way to school. Legs up in the air, arms up in the air…luckily my chin broke my fall. I split my chin from side to side (the scar is still awful to shave around) I had to run to my grandmothers house and my dad was called from work. My dad was a motor mechanic and he took an oily rag known at his work as “mutton cloth” and stuck it on my chin to stop the bleeding. We travelled to the local ENT hospital and I was seen by a junior doctor there who was tasked with repairing my chin.

The first challenge he encountered was the fact that the mutton cloth was now imbedded in my clotted wound!

This all occurred about 35 years ago and the memory is still quite clear to me. The junior doctor was absolutely fantastic, magnificent even. His communication skills were absolutely unbelievable. He put me at ease immediately and was able to talk me through the whole process and suture my chin under local anaesthetic (I was 5!!) I can still remember the story he told me as he stitched me up, about what they have to do to stitch up ants chins. He suggested to me that they have to cut an ants head off after its split its chin, stitch the chin and then stitch the head back on. It made me laugh out loud and put me at my ease so I was able to undergo the treatment.

It fills me with inspiration to even write this blog post now and to remember him. I wish I knew his name. I think it really left a mark on the way that I deal with people and the way that I treat people. I revisited that story many times when I was a junior house officer and a senior house officer, particularly when I had to look after other peoples children who had fallen and cut their faces. Its funny the things that influence you at such an early age and I am really conscious of this in my own children.

He was an absolute hero and I hope he went on to wonderful great things and had a very happy life.

Blog post number: 1505