anyone who’s ever tried to watch a horror movie (or a medical drama) with me knows that i’m a gore wuss. while i don’t mind getting shots or having blood drawn terribly, i can’t bear to watch a needle pierce the skin – even on television, i have avert my eyes for that moment (so i probably don’t have what it takes to be a heroin addict…) and don’t even get me started on my phobias about vomit.

so it’s odd, then, that i find myself sporting a sort of bravado when it comes to real life blood and gore. not that i have been face-to-face with a truly life-threatening emergency, but working in and around theatre and scene shops, i do see injuries. a forehead split open down to the bone, dry wall screw through the fingernail, a broken wrist, broken collarbone.

yesterday our TD came into the production office and said, “does this need stitches?” and he had sliced deeply into the top of his wrist with a chisel. when he flexed his wrist the wound gaped open. since it wasn’t bleeding a lot, there was no immediate danger, and we decided that stitches wouldn’t probably do anything that butterfly bandages couldn’t also do, plus it would require hours and hours spent in the emergency room. so i had him wash the wound out really well, taped it closed with butterfly bandages, then covered the whole thing with a bandage and ran medical tape over the top around his wrist to hold it all on. of course, since he went back to work in the shop for the rest of the afternoon (talk about bravado), the tape only held in place for a few hours. but i re-bandaged it at the end of the night and by the next day it seemed to have knit together. driving someone to the hospital for stitches and filling out worker’s comp paperwork is part of my job here, but closing up wounds doesn’t exactly does fall into my list job responsibilities. but i often force myself to look at or ask about an injury i guess as a way of testing my own mettle.

none of this makes me think that i’d want a future in medicine (germ-phobic, remember) but for some reason i like the fact that i’m surprisingly cool when i’m actually faced with blood and i don’t get totally grossed out. this is good, since my line of work requires people that are good in crisis situations (typically more of the set-is-on-fire sort of thing, but still). the thought of how i’ll handle the next emergency (be it a heart attack in the audience or an actor knocking himself out on stage) is the source of many an anxiety dream, but then i always seem to surprise myself in the moment.