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Column: Fairy godmothers come in unexpected places

The magical powers of my dental hygienist
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The dentist chair is not typically a place to discuss major life milestones. But it seems to work for this writer. (Citizen file)

It wasn’t too long after I moved to Duncan that I realized moving means you have to essentially re-set your life with a completely new roster of stores and services. (I was much younger then.) While finding new grocery stores and a tailor (hey! It’s important! I’ve got short legs!), and a new gym were easy, securing other services were not supposed to be. But they were. I was fortunate back then to find an exceptional doctor who to this day, I am so grateful for, and of course a dentist to maintain the heavily orthodonticked (I just made that word up) smile my parents paid a fortune for in braces when I was a teenager.

While not a complete list of the new life I had set up for myself all those years ago, it’s where I’m going to end it because I want to talk about one of those people I found back then.

I’m not going to tell you her name or where she works because I didn’t check with her before I sat down to write this but, I want to talk about the magical powers of my dental hygienist.

Stay with me here…

When I first met my hygienist I was a relative newcomer to the region, I had amassed a small collection of friends but mostly spent my days, nights and weekends working. (That’s what us reporters tend to do when we don’t have small children. The news, like said children, never sleeps.) Anyway, my hygienist likes to get to know her patients so she asked if I had a boyfriend.

“No. Not yet,” I said. My appointment ended with the standard glowing report on my oral hygiene and I went on my way.

Around six months later, I returned for my next scheduled visit with news.

“I have a boyfriend now!” My hygienist smiled and the cleaning, and life, continued.

By the next scheduled dentist visit, my boyfriend had moved in with me. By the one after that we’d become engaged.

Was this hygienist my fairy godmother? Without a joke, every single time I saw her, I had a new milestone to divulge.

Was it somehow her doing? Or maybe just me getting off my butt and living my life just to have something to report back about? I’m still not sure. But it didn’t end there.

During my next cleaning I described our wedding. She joked that it’s time for kids and a house. I wasn’t so sure it was that easy.

But she was right. I was pregnant with my first child at my subsequent cleaning and by the next trip to see her he’d been born and we’d bought our first home. Then came my second baby.

I swear this lady is MAGIC. It has no doubt become a bit of a running joke about what’s coming down the pipe for me.

I went from single, supermarketless (another word of my own making), work-a-holic, to home-owning, wife and mother of two — all under the eye of my dental hygienist.

The thing is, I feel like I’m running out of major life milestones. Though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intrigued about what she… I mean what life has in store for me next!



sarah.simpson@cowichanvalleycitizen.com

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Sarah Simpson

About the Author: Sarah Simpson

I started my time with Black Press Media as an intern, before joining the Citizen in the summer of 2004.
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