Think of some situations where someone else is controlling the position of your head. Examples might include sitting in dentist’s chair, having your hair washed at a hair salon, or when a doctor is examining you. Where do you look? What thoughts go through your mind? Do your eyes stare blankly into space. Do you gaze into the eyes of the person working on you? Or do you just close your eyes and daydream?
These kinds of trivial questions are what go through my head during those moments. I was recently sitting in my dental hygienist’s chair while she was working on cleaning my teeth, when this topic occurred to me.
Usually when my hair is being washed prior to getting my hair cut, I close my eyes or stare at the arms of the person that is washing my hair. I recently had cataract surgery, and before going under from anesthesia I was watching a TV monitor over my head showing the live cataract surgery that was being performed in the surgery room next door. I’m not sure whose idea that was. In the Dentist’s office a lot depends on what is being done. If the dentist is talking to me, I generally have my eyes open. Not that I could respond to any conversation either way (with my eyes open or closed). While a dental hygienist is working on me I stare blankly at the ceiling or occasionally close my eyes.
This past time, which is when I began contemplating this issue, was different. The hygienist was not only wearing a face mask, but also a clear plastic eye shield, to protect her eyes from the water that was splashing up from the water jet she was using to clean my teeth. She’d never worn one of those before. At first I did the usual, staring up into space, but then I began to stare into the face of the hygienist. A number of different things occurred to me as I was staring into her eyes. Does she know I’m staring at her eyes? And if so, how is that affecting her work? Does that make her self-conscious because she is being stared at, or is she comfortable with it, because everyone stares at her while getting his or her teeth done? Is she just staring at my mouth where she is working and totally unaware that she is being stared at? In which case, now I’m feeling self-conscious that I’m doing something that maybe I shouldn’t be doing.
This was not a question that I wanted to ask the hygienist.
I also noticed that I could see my reflection in the plastic shield that she was wearing. Now the task was to see if I could observe all of the work that she was doing in my mouth. This was a somewhat more daunting task and what I spend most of the time in the chair attempting to do, with very little success. Of course the simple solution would have been to ask the hygienist for a hand held mirror, which they have, for those patients that like to watch dentists while they work. It certainly would have given me a place to focus my attention, but that would have been too easy.
Besides, I was focused on the question of where people look in those types of situations anyway, which gave me more to write about.
So what do you look at?
