While drilling on a tooth, the dentist's face was fairly close to mine on my right, and his assistant was on my left. The dentist started absent-mindedly humming, and this reminded me of something I'd read while sitting in my doctor's office earlier in the year. So I shared the event with him.
While sitting in my regular doctor's office, I was reading a medical journal, and came across an article that discussed new doctors opening up their practices. One doctor, a gynecologist, shared an early experience he had which occured the first week of his new practice.
He had felt somewhat self-conscious as he began to examine the first of his new patients. She was an attractive young woman who'd come for a routine pelvic exam. She was lying on her back, with an apron across her upraised knees, and her feet in the examining table's "stirrups".
The doctor was out of view to her, but he was at her feet, beginning the examination of her pelvis, and began humming absent-mindedly as a method of overcoming his discomfort of shyness with his first patient.
In a moment he became aware that the patient was convulsing in quiet laughter, so he stopped, took a step back and said, "I'm sorry. Was I tickling you?"
"No", she replied. "But do you know what music you were humming?"
"Uh, ...no. I guess I forgot.", he said. "What was I humming?"
She continued to laugh, and replied, "You were humming: 'Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wiener....that is what I'd truly like to be--eeee-eee.'
Been in a few situations myself where performing that maneuver mighta been reassuring!
