Who Is Behind The Mask?

By Nana Dadzie Ghansah

Since late March, the hospital has mandated that everyone in the building needs to have a face mask on at all times — doctors, nurses, orderlies, administrative staff, patients, and the few family members who are allowed in. There are no exceptions.

This means that the patients we see and talk to in the Preop clinic are all masked. Besides discussing their upcoming surgery and anesthetic, we also need to get a history and examine them. One crucial part of the exam is of the airway. This helps to predict how easy or not it would be to intubate the patient. To do this, we usually instruct patients to pull down their masks and open their mouths. The oral inspection affords a good glimpse of the nature of their teeth or lack thereof, the uvula, the size of the tongue, and the pharynx.

For a few weeks now, I have been doing a little exercise.

Pre-pandemic, anytime I saw a patient in Preop, I got to see the uncovered face with all its expressions. With the masked patients of today, the only things visible in their face are the eyes. However, the eyes tell a story too. As the French say, “Les yeux sont le miroir de l’âme” (the eyes are the mirror of the soul). Many are those who, through the ages, have written or even sang about what the eyes hold.