Seeing Red

When Wendy Petrie leaned into the camera and "warned" TV1 viewers that they were about to see a real, beating human heart, I laughed. Hah! A beating heart? What's the prob, Wendy? What's so bad about that?

After all, popular dramas deliver buckets of blood every evening. CSI adores showing us hot metal slugs ploughing through mock-flesh. There are slow-mo close-ups of bullets and knives ripping into livers and lungs.

The news brings us real blood sprayed on walls, stained on clothes and congealed in car seats. Blood is so commonplace that we're unfazed at the thought of having All Black DNA hanging on the bedroom wall, infused into a promotional "bonded by blood" poster. We shrug at Colin Meads cutting himself shaving in an ad for All Blacks sponsor Mastercard while a dulcet voice intones, "Knowing we're all made of the same stuff - priceless".

Blood is everywhere.

There was a time when blood was just hinted at on TV. Vintage M.A.S.H. shows may have featured a few red splatters on Hawkeye's scrubs, but it was ER that really got us used to the sight of doctors daubed from shoulder to shin.

Nip/tuck was next to offer up dark storylines against a backdrop of shiny instruments and gloved hands immersed in ruby slush. And now Bodies, set in a gloomy British women's ward, shows there's no obstetric emergency deemed too lurid or liquid to zoom in on.

Real surgery's just fine, too. Discovery Channel's true-life ER show, Trauma, is merciless in showing actual blood oozing from quivering skin.

When Extreme Makeover arrived we found we could watch comfortably as people had component parts reorganized. Simultaneous eating was even possible. "Look at that guy's eye-bags," we'd murmur, reaching for another potato chip as a Beverly Hills surgeon laid lumpy semi-circles of pink flesh on white gauze.

We're also accustomed to seeing men (though not women) vacuuming abdomens. Rosy fat globules slide down those plastic tubes like damp fur balls hoovered from under the bed. And we're blasé about docs poking plastic bags into chests and wedging implants into the jaws of the chinless.

Such disinterest is remarkable for we're fiercely attached to our red stuff. Christians sip wine to remember Christ's quota of it. Sports teams go all out to score "first blood". Shakespeare had Henry V exhort his fighters to "stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood". Winston Churchill warned wartime Britain that he could offer nothing but "blood, toil, tears and sweat". When businesses and governments crash we say there's "blood on the floor".

Murder "in cold blood" seems somehow more horrible than the same crime committed in a of rage or passion. Our families are "flesh and blood". Toffs are still "blue bloods' and most of us stand by siblings because "blood is thicker than water." That is, unless we're in the midst of a "blood feud".

Blood is handy for swearing. In a crisis we get bloody furious and snarl any bloody insult we bloody well like.

The words just pop out of our mouths without any prior thinking. If we think about blood at all, we just hope that ours is pumping around nicely and carries only "good" cholesterol.

The only place we still don't see actual blood is in the coy world of "sanpro" (sanitary product) advertising. Blue-ink imagery has given way to more jokey approaches but there's absolutely no red in sight, even if a curious website called www.mum.org (run by a odd sort of bloke called Harry Finlay, in honour of his mother) is offering hundreds of cute period euphemisms. Big Red, Old Faithful, Carrie, Code Red, Monsoon, and The Hunt for Red October have been posted by eager contributors, along with AF (for Aunt Flo), Cousin Tom (for time of month), and any number of aunts (as in Aunt Sally has come to stay). Even early literary star Katherine Mansfield used a pert pet name - Aunt Martha.

All this jesting must all be hellish for the world's hematophobes - people with blood phobias. Such a character popped up on-screen last year in Doc Martin. Martin Clunes played a Cornish GP so squeamish that he had to look the other way when drawing a blood sample for the lab.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, blood phobics (as many as three or four per cent of the population) have fears of "seeing blood, receiving a blood test or injection, watching medical procedures on television, and for some individuals, even just talking about medical procedures".

Blood pressure and heart rate can plummet, causing fainting. There are plenty of things in life to be phobic about - snakes, spiders, birds, rats, heights, confined spaces, crowds and even clowns - but it's only blood (and needle) phobia that makes people pass out. Men and women are equally affected.

Many a tough guy has fainted in the maternity suite. Just seeing a doctor's blood-spotted surgical gumboots can turn some dads pale, yet Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ drew crowds who managed to sit through brutal flogging with little more than a wince and a whimper. But then, movies have long been plumbing bloody depths. Classic sloshy moments include the critter head-butting its way out of a man's chest in Alien, the pluming head shots in Pulp Fiction, the bucket-of-blood spill over Carrie in Carrie, even the murky plughole swirl in dear old black-and-white Psycho.

We cringe, of course, but knowing it is make-believe allows us to keep the violence in a mental safety-zone.

The Broadcasting Standards Authority's communications and research advisor, Kate Ward, says the authority has received no complaints about surgical gore on TV. "Even though there might be a 'yuk factor' about it, I think maybe we see operating theatres as some sort of holy place," she theorises.

The director of psychological services at Auckland Phobic Trust, Gavriel Philip, (says some people can't even watch the news for fear of seeing something awful, "but thrillers and movies don't have the same impact".

Even so, he adds that it's still "highly appropriate" for networks to screen warnings before they show lots of blood and/or surgery.

Hematophobia is often co-mingled with other anxieties and panic disorders. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can make recovery more complicated, but most anxiety disorders are "highly treatable", Philip says.

Cognitive behaviour therapy helps people recognise and challenge the thoughts that arise around a phobia and sufferers can also learn relaxation techniques. "It's all about establishing control."

Meanwhile, the tougher ones amongst us can still calmly watch news footage of carnage in dusty Middle Eastern streets and feel little more than dull despair.
If blood belongs to others then we scarcely notice it, leading perhaps to the ease with which so many people pick up rocks, knives and guns these days to spill even more.

If it's our own, well, different story. We're not fond of sharing it at all. The blood transfusion service has to bust a gut, so to speak, to persuade us to give any away. (Go to www.bloodnz.co.nz to find out more). Fewer than five percent of New Zealand's possible donors actually get around to baring a vein.

Maybe it's because we don't, in reality, like to see the stuff at all. Prone on an operating table a while ago as a camera took a look inside, I heard a nurse suggest that I might like to watch the surgeon's monitor screen. 'Lots of people find it interesting,' she chirped. I turned my groggy head and then shrank from the shocking sight of the bright sea inside me. I think it should be hidden again, all that red, tucked away under the skin where it ought to be, not dripping all over our television sets. Using so much blood for mere entertainment, we are losing some of our humanity.

New Zealand Herald