I started my lecture in London with this story. I also told it without pictures the Friday before in Cheltenham and I think I should probably tell it here. I hope you like it!
On 9th July 2016 I went to see an Orthopedic surgeon in Derby, you can read about it here. It was a routine appointment to help me get over a little bit of knee pain I had while running before I went off to do an epic event in October. In the space of an hour and a half he told me I’d never be able to run again – it was quite an experience in healthcare for a surgeon who became a patient, who was so upset that he drove 30 minutes in the wrong direction away from the hospital.
Whilst trying to get over that (something I thought was the biggest thing to me in the world for a short while) I received a telephone call 2 days before I went on holiday with my family from one of my best friend’s sons to tell me that he had died when they were both on a bike ride in Majorca. I went on holiday with my family two days later in the early stages of terrible grief for both of those things. As an aside, when I go on holiday with the family that we share our summer holiday with, it’s always a somewhat intimidating experience on the afternoons when we sit together and drink coffee while the kids go for an ice cream. Kath, the mum of the other family, has a PhD (a proper Doctor) she has worked in research laboratories and done proper work that has made a difference to society, a real contribution. We are so privileged now to have her running the research side of things at the practice, she is a very clever lady. Usually sat next to her is her husband Mike, as I explained to the guys in London on Friday night he is effectively God. Mike is a Consultant Cardiologist who provides internal catheter procedures (that’s one of his jobs) for people having major heart attacks. If Mike is drunk at work or doesn’t turn up it’s likely that people might die. The third person sat around the table is Alison, my wife. She is a Macmillan nurse for children, a nurse specialist one of whose roles is to provide palliative care at home for children who are dying of cancer.
The last person at the table is me… I am a dentist. This is not a blog about how overvalued dentists are, although that would be a good blog, this is a blog about swimming in the 50m swimming pool at the holiday camp feeling very sad about the things that had happened to me and being somewhat intimidated by the people I sit with. As I came to turn at the end of one of the lengths someone tapped me on the head and I looked up to see my wife standing there with my son beside her, framed by the Italian sunshine, my little 8 year old boy smiling and do you know what I thought?... “FOR F*&£S SAKE” He was smiling at me with a fractured upper left central incisor that he’d cracked off the bottom of the swimming pool while doing flips into the pool with Ethan his friend (the son from the other family). And so not to make this too long a blog, the punch line is here (you can see his picture as the feature picture on the web version of the blog) I had to take my son to the dentist in Italy and for the second time in a month I was a patient (or patient’s advocate) it does us no harm.
I was very fragile, very upset and very emotional. I asked the lady at the campsite to tell them that I was a dentist because I felt that was important but she didn’t and we walked 2.5miles in the Italian sunshine to get to the practice. It was a beautiful villa with a burnt orange Audi R8 out the front and I was intimidated. We entered the practice and it was very professional. The Principal was Dr. Sinisi an ageing implant dentist who oversaw everything that happened in each surgery and had designed the practice to ensure that he could easily enter each surgery to see what was going on. The dentist we saw was a young, handsome, tanned and well turned out Italian called Eduardo. I handed my son over to Eduardo and I sat at the end of the chair like thousands of people have done in my surgery. He spoke to us in perfect English – so kind, so gentle and so interested.
What I wanted at that moment, the dentist that I wanted, was the dentist we should all aspire to be. At University we studied the ideal properties of dental materials but I’m not sure we studied the ideal properties of dentists. I could have listed the ideal properties of a dentist right there, what I wanted Eduardo to be. How I wanted him to care for my son, how I wanted him to know about what we was doing and how I wanted him to communicate. It was an extraordinary, eye opening experience and made me reflect heavily on who I am in surgery and what I do. I explained to Eduardo what I did for a living and he turned to me and said “would you like to do this and I’ll assist?” In that moment he removed all issues of trust and cost. He was wonderful, everything you could have hoped for. I wish I could be the same. He also restored Callum’s upper incisor perfectly and in the end they refused to charge me because I was a colleague. A little bit more than a story but something that I hope helps us to all reflect on the dentists we would like to be.
Blog Post Number - 1203
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