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Sometimes in this blog I do that thing where I say, ‘jump to’. I like to do that, it tickles me.

So, let's jump to 2005 or thereabouts at Grangewood Dental Practice in Wollaton in Nottingham.

I'm upstairs in the little office at the top of the stairs in what is effectively a converted bungalow.

There's one dental surgery upstairs that I usually work in when I'm there and the little office that I usually do admin, which I've made my own, even though it's not my own.

I'm talking to my then boss and principal (one half of a married partnership) Andy Keetley and we were talking about being at our lowest ebb. I remember it well.

It will have been after Christmas that year, whichever year it was, and the nights would have been dark, and I'll be working too hard and I would have been getting fat and stressed and there will be problems with patients or other things, and I told him that I felt I’d reached rock bottom.

The interesting view of Andy at that time was “how do you know?”

This is really insightful (and Andy was really insightful in many ways) because sometimes when we feel we're at the bottom we've got further to drop, and we only really understand where the bottom was when we're not at the bottom anymore.

We can't stay at the bottom for long, we either go down further or come up and therefore when we start to come up, we understand where the lowest point existed.

At the moment I'm heading downwards or at least I'm at the bottom because I've been unwell with a common cold which has lasted much longer than it ever would because I have lost my immunity memory through Covid I suspect. But that impacts on the thyroid thing, which makes that worse and then I lose the ability to use my head and then I fall behind etc, etc, etc.

This is not a cry for help, not in any way requiring any assistance from anybody else because it's only the same type of stuff that we all deal with day by day and month by month and year by year. But now I look back to other points when I hit the bottom and it's interesting to note that the bottom exists at different levels.

I suppose for me some of the most difficult times will have come in building the practice in the lead up to 2020 in the pandemic and there were two specific times there where It was obvious to see that I dipped right down to the lowest possible point.

The first one was in December of 2019 when we had a finance meeting just before our annual Christmas fuddle (which is supposed to be about the best day of the year in the practice).

It was right then I realised that we were completely broke, and it had crept up on me and I should have known earlier, but it was dark.

I managed to haul myself back up from that again and talk to myself and say, “it's never as bad as it seems”.  

But then I travelled in January to Exeter to talk to a large BDA group about my previous GDC case, a lecture that was still rumbling on at that time because people were still interested in that stuff, which I'm glad to say they are not now.

I remember that night in the hotel in Exeter was probably the lowest possible point of the whole thing and I remember arriving back on the train to East Midlands Parkway and phoning my project manager at the time and saying, “what happens if I die today, what will happen to my family?”.

My point is that we don't know where the low point is until after the low point.

What happened after that conversation in the car park is, I just picked myself up and got back to work and as I think back to that now (almost three years later) I just worked a way out and whatever had happened at that point (probably apart from the death) would have been fine and I would have been okay, and my family would have been OK too.

I think sometimes it takes getting to the bottom and getting back out again to realise, at least for me, it's a cyclical thing and we're always going to get to the bottom again but that means we're probably always going to get to the top again.

And during these times I realised that the best thing I can do is just put one tiny little foot in front of the other (30 minutes on my bike at the weekend) as easy as possible in a shed, which is rubbish but better than nothing.

Blog Post Number - 3293