50 Ways to Leave Your Dentist

Last month, Boston Globe columnist Beverly Beckham wrote a column with the above title. I contacted Beverly and she gave me permission to reprint her column. Due to the size of my column, I am printing an excerpt from her original.
I will tell him tomorrow. I will pick-up the phone and call his office and talk to his receptionist and say, “I have to cancel my appointment.” And she will say, “When would you like to reschedule?” And I will say…..What will I say?
I am trying to break up with my dentist, and I don’t know how. I don’t want to hurt his feelings. We’ve been together for 30 years, longer than most marriages.
“How about I tell him I’m moving?” I ask my friend Beth, who is the reason I’m in this mess in the first place. We were walking and she was laughing, and I noticed her back teeth. “How come you don’t have any fillings? Your teeth look perfect.” “ I used to have fillings. These are crowns.” I made her open her mouth. I peered inside. They didn’t look like crowns.
I should have said right then, don’t tell me anymore. I should have blocked my ears and said I have a dentist. I like my dentist. I am not going to leave him. Who sees the inside of my mouth anyway?
But Beth kept talking, and I kept staring at her molars and bicuspids thinking, wow. So I went to meet this dentist. It was just a consultation. Everyone should have a second opinion, right? Trouble is, I liked her. We clicked. Now I have to call the Man who has taken care of my teeth for three long decades and tell him I’m moving. “You can’t tell him that,” Beth says. “Why not? Maybe I will move.” “We’re not moving,” my husband says.
Not too many years ago, I cheated on my hairdresser. A friend, as a birthday present, took me to hers. She watched gleefully as he cut and styled my wild hair and morphed me into a more refined rendition of me. I went back to him once, twice, maybe five times. And then I returned to my hairdresser. Why? Because I missed her. Maybe I’ll miss my dentist too.
In the meantime, though, there’s now. The breakup. The fess up. The records that have to be transferred. The phone call that has to be made.
“Yes, it’s me calling from New Zealand. We moved. It was sudden. I know, I know. I’m going to miss you, too.”
I am sure that many of you can relate to Beverly’s story. I know I can….maybe not with my dentist but with other service providers. We often get caught in a comfort zone. We like the person and there is no real reason to leave. Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with loyalty. The point is – there are many different ways to do the same thing.
It is difficult for us as consumers to randomly pick people to work on our teeth, cut our hair, service our car, etc. There are so many options. What if we are comfortable where we are? What if we are missing something by not going somewhere else? The only thing we really can do is to keep an open mind and to take the information we learn to make a decision on what we feel is right for us as individuals.