The surgeon five minutes from my door that I almost never found

I had it booked. Consultation done, all my questions asked, deposit paid, date in the calendar. On paper I had done everything right.

Brilliant at everything else

The surgeon I booked with was brilliant. I had been going to him for other things for years and he was excellent at all of it. That was the problem, really, and it took me a while to let myself say it. He was excellent at a lot of things. The operation I wanted was not the one thing he did day in, day out. It was more of a side piece for him.

I kept pushing the thought down. I know this world a little, so I should have known better, and even so I kept telling myself to stop being difficult. He is a doctor, he is good, who was I to question it. But it niggled and it would not stop. You would not go to a general surgeon for a nose job. If you want a rhinoplasty you find the person who does rhinoplasty, not someone who does a bit of everything, and somewhere in me I knew the same thing was true here. This was my eyes, for God's sake. If anything goes wrong, that is the one place everybody looks.

There was something else, too. Somewhere in the process I realised the final step of his actually becoming a plastic surgeon had not quite been completed. All the training was there, but the title itself was not. And when I looked him up afterwards there was nothing, no before and afters of this operation, nothing to show it was really his thing. I noticed all of it and I still nearly went ahead, because he was so good at everything else.

What the dog did

What actually stopped me was the dog. The morning of the surgery she got very sick, out of nowhere, and I spent the day at the vet instead of in a waiting room. I had to cancel the whole thing. I was upset at the time. Looking back she did me a favour, because cancelling handed me the one thing I had refused to give myself, which was a bit of time to stop and ask whether I was about to do the wrong thing for the right reasons.

Starting again

So I started again, and this time I threw everything at it. The procedure plus “near me”. Same on Instagram. Then I went properly down the rabbit hole, asking AI to help, digging and digging, trying to find whoever was clearly the best at this one operation. And I kept catching myself thinking about other countries, because you see it constantly, people flying in and flying out, the UK crowd going over to Amsterdam, all of it looking quick and easy on TikTok. So I was weighing up a few countries at once, trying to find the best one I could reach. Hours of this. Nothing felt like the answer. It was like trying to pick a coffee shop. Endless options, no way to tell which one was actually right.

Five minutes from my door

Then I found him. One of the most experienced people in the country at my exact procedure, and he was a few minutes' walk from my front door. He had been invisible the entire time. The website was almost useless. Barely anything on social media. He did not advertise, and he had not come up once, anywhere, no matter how hard I looked. I can only assume he runs almost entirely on referral.

When I finally sat in his consultation he asked how I had found him, and when I said AI he was genuinely taken aback. I think I might have been the first person who ever turned up that way.

Something settled in me in that room. All the worry I had been carrying, the booked date I had cancelled, the going round and round, it just lifted. Not because anyone told me he was wonderful. Because I could see this was someone who does this operation all the time, that it is the whole job and not a sideline, and knowing that took the fear right off. It is your eyes. Get it wrong and it is the first thing you see in the mirror every morning for the rest of your life.

The surgery could not have gone better. A year on you would never know I had anything done, and the whole thing, the result, the recovery, the team around him, was as good as it gets.

The person who comes up first when you search is usually just the person who is best at coming up first when you search.

What I took from it

What I took from it is that the best surgeons are often the ones you cannot find. They are busy, they run on referrals, and a lot of them have no clue about marketing and no interest in learning. The person who comes up first when you search is usually just the person who is best at coming up first when you search. That is a different skill, and it has nothing to do with your face.

That is what a search for a surgeon should do: find the person who is quietly brilliant at your exact operation and put them in front of you, even when they would never in a hundred years have found you.