Hello, I’m Kirsty, one of the lead nurses here at Thackeray Dental Care, I’ve worked here as a dental nurse for over 10 years, (with a little break to try something new in the hospital only to find it wasn’t for me) and I ended up begging Simon to take me back as a nurse which he did initially on 1 day as more of a locum, until he found himself needing me for more hours which then I went up to 3 days a week.

We then lost our lead nurse which then found myself being promoted to lead nurse again. It has its ups and downs – I am not a born leader and I find it difficult to be assertive, but I’ve worked on my skills and I hope all the nurses are happy with the way I conduct myself within the practice.

This pandemic is something that I have never seen in all my years of working as a dental nurse (16 years, I know I don’t look old enough to have worked that long – I wish!) but never had I thought that I would find myself with a job but with no work. I was one of the first staff members to be furloughed by Simon, (taking in account my 2 children which I can not thank him enough for), it was one less stress I had to deal with. Homeschooling the girls is not easy, they lack concentration at home and are always hungry or thirsty when we are doing something important.

I was also taking my Maths GCSE this year – although exams are no longer taking place (and this was another stress I had to deal with – not knowing if I would come under the pupils that have their GCSEs results without taking the exam). Although this was later confirmed by my college that I will thankfully be getting a grade for this, although it took sometime to get clarification.

So that’s a bit about myself, but the real reason I’m writing this blog is that I was due to get married in August this year, so as you can imagine we have had a lot of conversations about the wedding, I was finding myself so anxious about it over thinking everything like how many guest would be allowed? would people travel to Whitby from Mansfield? Would the accommodation people have booked be open and accepting guests? Would my suppliers be open to alter my dresses get my hair done, get everything in place in time? And what if they we asymptomatic and infected my elderly guests or guests with underlying conditions? How much money would we lose if we rearranged?