In March 2008, I discovered that the practices I had been working at as an associate for nearly 11 years had been sold to the largest DSO (corporate) in the UK.
The DSO did not have a good reputation.
Even though I had worked for so long and developed so much in the practices I was in, including the first PDS Oral Surgery service in the United Kingdom and an implant service placing 250 implants per year, I left in short order and went somewhere else.
In the changes that followed, I, first of all, lost all the ability to do NHS oral surgery and then gained even more ability to do that after being awarded a contract from the Primary Care Trust in Derbyshire to provide all oral surgery for the north of Derbyshire (a considerable improvement on what I had before) but this kind of misses the point or just at least sets context.
In the weeks that passed after the corporate had taken over the practice I was working in and as I was about to leave, they came in wholesale and just took things away and, most notably, the PC, which was present in the office, which was at the top of the stairs which I had always been able to use for various things, while the practice was an independent.
Stupidly (on my part), on that PC were my logs for all my oral surgery cases and implant cases that I had done for the previous nearly 11 years.
I lost all that data in a flash when I came into work one day, and they had taken the PC away, thrown it in a bin somewhere else and installed the new corporate PC.
Luckily for me, on a separate machine, I had all my referring GDP's details, and I was able to write to them. Still, I lost a log of literally thousands of cases of implants, oral surgery and sedation.
And so, the reason I give you the context for this is that I know what I have done since, and I know roughly what I had done then, and I know that I stopped counting surgical third molar removals at 3000 and have done quite a lot since that 3000 times.
I don't do anything like the amount that I used to, but I still do them regularly, almost weekly, and the third molars that I remove tend to be the most complex third molars.
With that in mind and that backdrop, I set out this morning to take out two horizontally impacted lower third moulders under sedation together with an easy upper left third molar.
The lower right third molar was grossly carious, which makes it much more difficult, and they were intrinsically linked to the inferior dental canal, based on a CBCT that I had taken before removing these (which I would do in every case).
And so, my friend and colleague at the practice, Dominic Smithers, who joined us last year and who is training to be the next big thing in implant dentistry, surgery and restorative (all the components to be the best dentists in the world) sedated the patient and provided local anaesthetic, and then I came down to take the teeth out.
I don't take anything like the amount of wisdom teeth I used to take out now, and these took longer than I expected because they were much more complicated (some of the most complicated third models I've taken out for ages).
But throughout the procedure, I was able to vocalise what I was doing to stop, to demonstrate, to show how I did it and what my thought processes were (the lower left was much more difficult than I imagined it would be).
In the end, everything came all out. The patient will be sore, but they will do fine.
But the joy in this procedure now is not doing it; it's talking about it.
For years, that voice has just rattled around inside my head, but to be able to show and to tell and to explain what I'm doing based on more than 25 years of experience of taking out third molars is such a great joy, and to have someone, and particularly someone as interested and engaged as Dom to share it with is an even greater joy again.
I would encourage you to try to find things like that in your practice the more experience you get because when you get to this stage, it's way past being about the money.
Blog Post Number - 3633
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