About a thousand times in these pages (we’re at number 3128) I’ve explained the story where Chris Barrow taught me what love is.
He taught me that by teaching me the opposite of love which he told me, and which is entirely correct is indifference.
Once you travel through a process with something or someone that you loved and you reach a point where you do not give a sh*t about that thing or person anymore then you have reached the opposite of love, therefore love must be when you do give a sh*t about that thing and I thought about that the other day.
The other morning, I was placing implants on a 72-year-old lady in the lower left side. For whatever reason I had to place an implant in the lower left central incisor and the lower left canine, in an area that was extremely difficult to work with, with considerable bone loss and defects and all sorts of surgical crap that nobody really wants to know about.
Right in the middle of that (and I now get this quite a lot in my Tuesday morning surgical sessions) I’ve found myself deep in ‘flow’ where I was just engrossed in what I was doing and trying to think in 360 degrees about the whole process.
I placed the first implant into a defect and then was placing the second one, but I knew that my heart rate had increased a little bit as I really wanted it to be in the right place and I really wanted it to be stable and I really wanted it to be right and then I finished, and I’d placed the two implants and I was happy with it.
Right in the midst of all this I thought ‘god I must love this’ because if I didn’t give a sh*t about where they ended up and I was just here to provide a service commitment to get money to pay for something else then it wouldn’t really matter too much.
I think when I don’t feel that anymore then I think it’s probably time to stop.
I think the one time that happens now is when you do too much so when I’m in a situation where I’m having to place too many implants because the service commitment dictates it then the love decreases.
My ideal situation is thinking deeply and in a sophisticated way about each individual implant that I place (and the ones that fall out too).
As I get older that’s what I’d like to do. Gone, I think, are the days of having a totaliser to count the number of implants I place on a week-by-week and month-by-month basis.
‘The race is long and in the end it’s only with yourself’.
Blog Post Number - 3128