I’m very scared of having blood drawn. I can postpone this for days, for months. I can think of other much more important things to do, like pulling the dead leaves off the geraniums. Whenever I do go to have blood taken, I look at the guest list in the waiting room. The blood donors all look calm, unruffled. My heart beats, my palms are soaked. I walk out to try again "tomorrow." When I finally succeed and get the band around my arm, I ask them to loosen it, use the other arm.

I close my eyes, not to see the blood or the needle. Now, my job acting on a soap opera, pays me to play a nurse of all things — not only that, a head nurse which means, horribly, I have to take blood pressure, pulses — pulses — this is terrible. It means somewhere in us there’s a heart pounding and it could stop. In my aerobic classes I never check my pulse. I pretend to, but to really feel the life throbbing, it’s too intimate. My body inside should not want me checking on its processes continually. It is working happily, doing its thing — living, without me constantly monitoring it.

But back to work — occasionally I have to draw blood. This is nearly too much. I get woozy even though it’s a fake draw. But the fake blood looks so real. I have to talk continually about body things — "pulse 94 sinus rhythm." I should find out what sinus rhythm is but I can’t. It’s not possible to pry into the body’s life.

Today I have a line about the blood leaking into the sack around the heart. How can I say it? I am supposed to be calm and in control at Cedars Hospital. Instead, for fifteen years I’ve been giddy.

The fact that the actor, covered in blood, gets up and walks away after the scene is no help at all. Those machines pump and click and flatline, no less. If an actor wants too much money, he has an accident and in the o.r. he flatlines.

Magic and mystery are what my body wants and I intend to keep it that way.

By Tina