As I write this post, it is 5.00am and I am travelling to Scotland to take part in a 4-day cycle tour with some of my mates.
I have been driven to write this after a seeing a patient work yesterday morning who has had me thinking the entire time since he left my surgery.
The patient is a retired GDP who was referred to see me by his former partner in the practice. He had been practicing in Nottingham in NHS practice since around the time that I was born.
It is always a pleasure to see colleagues in the practice, I deem it to be a huge privilege and we began with the usual talk about the profession and the state of business in dentistry.
My colleague informed me that he had retired recently because of his disgust at the new contract but also because his back was so badly broken that he could no longer practice. His oral health and condition is, by a long way, not the worst that I have seen in practice but certainly not the best and he now required quite a considerable amount of remedial work. He said to me in surgery yesterday “now it’s time for my teeth”
He opened up to me over the time in surgery and told me about a personal tragedy that is occurring in his life at the moment and also about concerns he has for his health. All I could think, selfishly, was ‘I will not and cannot let this become me’.
I refuse to get to retirement age or before and be worn out and fed up of being a dentist. There are too many opportunities that I see in dentistry in clinical practice, teaching, education, medico legal work, corporate social responsibility and I just feel that there is no way that I could ever get round them all in one career. When I do get to retirement age, I want my enthusiasm for dentistry and my desire to participate in dentistry to be stronger than ever so that I feel it is actually impossible for me to give up and have to continue, at least in some part, to be involved if someone will allow me to do so.
In order to achieve this I have to keep my professional life mixed and varied, trying new things and taking new opportunities as they come along. This way I feel I can manage to keep things fresh, interesting and exciting and will hopefully come up against potential new opportunities which will keep me inspired until I enter my dotage.
I left the rat race 4 years ago. Yesterday I may have seen a vision of the guy I would have been if I had stayed.
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