One of my oldest (Nottingham based) friends in the world came to the clinic the other day.
Phil Hollows, who taught me how to be a surgeon back in the 90’s and went on to be what I would consider to be one of the finest surgeons I’ve ever seen, brought his daughter to the practice for a filling.
Phil is retired but we had a cup of tea and a conversation about what it was like when we hit the ground running in the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham in 1995.
Phil had just returned from his medical training in plastics, general and neurosurgery and I had just arrived from Glasgow in a second-hand car with my whole life in it to a city that I knew nothing about.
One of the things we were reminiscing about was working with a consultant surgeon called Mike Bromige who had been an institution in Nottingham maxillofacial surgery for years.
Mike was a singly qualified (dental) surgical consultant who did mostly wisdom teeth and canine exposures and a little bit of cleft repairs at second stage when kids were aged 12 or 13.
He would do fractured mandibles and zygomas but nothing more complicated than that although he was really, really brilliant with his hands and could repair orbital flaws in mid-third factures.
The thing about Mike was he had a wonderful life.
A really healthy and well sustained private practice, top consultant salary and not really a load of sh*t that people currently have to deal with.
When I think back on Mike’s life, he was coming to the end of his consultant job when I worked there, he was from another era.
He was very well respected for the work that he’d done over the years and very, very experience in his field, but it wasn’t particularly complex.
There was no digital, no email, no video conferencing and no real sign that the general medical council or the general dental council would come anywhere near you unless you were the most terrible person in the world.
You came to work, got respected because you did that job, and then went home to do all the wonderful things you did with all the money that you had and the respect that you had and the time and the peace that you had.
How different the world is now?
By the time Phil finished his maxillofacial job (pretty much in the same post as Mike) they were CAD/CAM designing titanium frameworks to screw free flaps onto for cancer reconstruction and providing distraction osteogenesis procedures to regrow mandibular defects.
I think we can now see why people are losing their minds.
Mike’s job didn’t change a massive amount over the last 20 years that he worked, but in the most recent 20 years it’s changed exponentially.
It’s fine to ride the wave of change but only a little one and really only one at a time.
Blog Post Number - 3267