THE PUS PUDDLE ROBYN DICKINSON

THE PUS PUDDLE

BY ROBYN DICKINSON (07-09)

My weekend involved digging for the root of a tooth that was completely submerged in a puddle of blood saliva and pus. I couldn’t see what I was doing, but could vaguely feel what I was searching for. The lady I was treating was a lovely ex-midwife, who had a not so lovely facial swelling (orange sized) due to quite a nasty abscess. By most people’s standards, it was pretty disgusting. And I suppose I have RGS to thank for getting me into that situation.

a 12 month advanced course in fixing smiles and making teeth pretty, which is a nice change from NHS dentistry. Like all areas in the NHS, funding and quality are huge problems. The whole system is under-funded (without getting too political: probably intentionally so) and the result is that it makes it very hard to deliver quality NHS dentistry at times.

Around the same time, I started to pick up a bit of emergency work in Teesside, this area has some of the worst dental health in the whole of the UK. It did leave me feeling like I could extract teeth day in day out for my entire career and not even make a dent, such is the scale of the issue there. We provide a service for people who only access dentistry when they have issues, and this can be fairly eye opening.

On the personal side of things, the last 12 months have brought more variety in the form of our little boy Mitch who arrived in June 2019, so I had a short break from dentistry until this February. I headed back to work (very) part time at Sunderland (although we haven’t been able to provide much due to COVID-19), as well as Newcastle and Northumberland’s emergency dental service and a half day a week supervising the dental students over at the Dental Hospital. They seem much more competent than I remember being!

Ijoined RGS in 2007 for the Sixth Form. The link to RGS is a family one, with my dad having worked at the school for many years as one of the North East’s leading PE teachers (!). Prior to this I went to my local school and always did OK but was not, by any measures, a genius. As UCAS time came around, dentistry didn’t seem like a bad plan: I probably chose it for the wrong reasons, but I ticked their boxes, and to be completely honest, never had any better ideas before deadline time.

I got my grades and went to Newcastle University in September 2009. It was five years of deadlines and graft, which after sequential exams from age 16, gets pretty tedious. The best part was seeing the pass list at the end. After graduating, my first job was at the Dental Hospital here in Newcastle (spreading my wings as always!). Basically, two years of doing a bit of all sorts of dentistry, alongside some General Practice. They say variety is the spice of life, and I really did love this way of working.

I then moved into General Practice, which is day to day dentistry that most people would recognise from their own dental visits. This was pretty steady, although one practice was on the edge of the Meadow Well, so the work wasn’t always glamorous. I worked there for about 18 months, and then made the switch to a practice in Seaham. I have trained up a bit, doing some braces courses, and

Plate G2: Development of Tooth, in Brass, Atlas of Human Histology (1897)