Another Reason to Celebrate

Apparently my husband has now been a dentist for 20 years. He thinks yesterday was his first day working, which is remarkable for him as he is generally useless with dates.

His first year of working life ended up rather fraught as within three months of being qualified he was accused by a nutty patient (and he was truly truly bonkers) of having crowned the wrong tooth. Said patient bombarded the local healthcare trust with letters talking about Spouse's "rouged lips" and the way he "comes at me from behind wearing a buff coloured mask". He also roundly abused the good constabulary of the Weybridge area where Spouse was working at the time, all of whom were apparently gay. Despite the obvious timewasting crap of his letters, the healthcare were obliged to investigate and Spouse ended up going to a tribunal where Loony Tunes discovered that yes, in fact, he had had the right tooth crowned. It was a total waste of time for all concerned, and caused Spouse a considerable degree of stress at the time.

I was of course a loving supportive wife, etc, etc (oh actually we weren't quite married then,but you know what I mean). But the writing bit of me never goes to sleep apparently, and the genesis of Strictly Love was formed then. I really loathe the litigation culture we have here now, which Spouse had a first dismal taster of twenty years ago, and so I wanted to write about it. While undoubtedly, there are people who do things wrong in all areas of the medical profession, it is my belief that the majority of them are trying to do the right thing, and the threat of being sued does no one (least of all the patient) much good.

So my hero dentist, Mark, gets sued by one of his zedlebrity patients for breach of trust, and I hope I've shown the devastation that an action which she takes relatively lightly can cause. As this is romantic fiction, I hope it's not too heavy and message laden - you do get lots of dancing thrown in, I promise - but I also don't see why you can't mix serious stuff into popular culture too.

And as Spouse has spent twenty years at the coalface (how the fuck did that happen anyway? Yesterday we were twenty), I'd just like to raise a metaphorical glass to him and all the teeth he has drilled, filled, cleaned and extracted over the last two decades. Someone's got to do it...