I learnt to be ‘an implant guy’ in an NHS practice in Ilkeston in Derbyshire in the late 90’s and early 2000’s.
Some of the guys who are my age in Europe and America learnt in very different ways and places.
I learnt to ‘box clever’ and to make it work through an NHS appointment book and to deal with disappointment of patients when things happened and that weren’t supposed to happen and to run my own on-call service and to order my own stuff and to manage costs and all of that.
If I’d learnt on a specialist training pathway in Switzerland, my experience would have been different.
And so, when I now measure myself against some of the greatest implant clinicians in the world, I find myself wanting in almost every singly aspect of my work but I’m not really comparing like with like.
In later years, I always wondered what it would have been like if I’d had the chance to go to Oxford or Cambridge to university to study something like economics or political science but when I was growing up I didn’t even know Oxford and Cambridge existed and so there was no chance of that.
When I started providing implant treatment in Ilkeston in Derbyshire, I had no idea where the centres of implant excellence were and no access to them anyway.
It seems to me that we constantly measure ourselves against people whose circumstances were entirely different to ours yet are still disappointed that we’re not able to reach the heights that they reach, even though the system is gamed against us to be able to do that.
At 50, I’m unlikely to be able to change my spots to any huge degree from here and so what I should do is sit back and admire people who maybe had a better start than I did and who’ve been able to reach higher peaks that I can.
Blog Post Number - 3132