#362 The Girl That Survived — Kathryn Bell

<p>Kathryn Bell was seventeen, six months into a school exchange trip to Kentucky, when a minor car crash jolted loose a brain tumour nobody knew was there. She joins Payman as a general dentist at Colosseum Dental in Chippenham and the group&#39;s key opinion leader for facial aesthetics, having spent over two decades qualified after a start to adult life that involved an emergency craniotomy, a coma, meningitis and hydrocephalus, largely without her parents in the room.</p><p>She talks with real clarity about survivor&#39;s guilt, about repeating a year at school rather than falling behind her friends, and about the internal motivation that got her through GCSEs with headaches nobody could explain, years before anyone found the tumour causing them. There&#39;s a second, quieter story running alongside it too: a burnout so complete she couldn&#39;t get out of bed most mornings on the NHS, and the daughter whose birth, entirely by coincidence, pulled her out of it just in time.</p><p>Kathryn also gets specific about the actual craft of facial aesthetics: polynucleotides, why subtlety beats a dramatic result every time, and the patient with suspected body dysmorphia who brought her own fifty-times magnifying mirror to a review appointment.</p><p> </p><p><strong>In This Episode</strong></p><p>00:00:45 – Introduction</p><p>00:01:45 – The brain tumour story</p><p>00:17:40 – Survivor&#39;s guilt</p><p>00:20:25 – Choosing dentistry</p><p>00:22:45 – Losing time at school</p><p>00:28:30 – Master&#39;s in aesthetic medicine</p><p>00:31:05 – Social media and dysmorphia</p><p>00:33:00 – Introducing facial aesthetics</p><p>00:40:00 – Skin treatments vs injectables</p><p>00:45:30 – A facial aesthetics mistake</p><p>00:56:20 – Women in dentistry</p><p>01:02:50 – A career mistake</p><p>01:09:55 – Burnout on the NHS</p><p>01:14:30 – Best lecture: Callum Youngson</p><p>01:19:35 – Fantasy dinner party</p><p> </p><p><strong>About Kathryn Bell</strong></p><p>Kathryn Bell is a general dentist at Colosseum Dental in Chippenham and the group&#39;s key opinion leader for facial aesthetics across its 80 practices. She holds an MSc in Aesthetic Medicine, researching how social media shapes aesthetic patients&#39; self-perception, and survived a brain haemorrhage and tumour removal at the age of seventeen.</p>