Zoe Tay’s Florence Nightingale dream

SINGAPORE — In her first television drama since last year’s The Dream Makers, Zoe Tay gets to live out her childhood ambition: She plays an experienced nurse in the coming MediaCorp TV Channel 8 medical drama You Can Be An Angel Too.

On Monday, MediaCorp’s Ah Jie attended a training session at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, together with fellow cast members Xiang Yun, Elvin Ng, Bryan Wong, Aloysius Pang, Xu Bin and Sheila Sim. The actors were equipped with basic medical skills such as CPR, blood-taking and even how to change the sheets of a patient’s hospital bed. The show also stars Rebecca Lim and Zheng Geping.

“I had always wondered how CPR was done,” said Tay after her session. “It’s not as easy as I thought. The procedure we learnt is the proper one, which is important. There’s a lot of energy involved, your posture has to be correct and you have to do it at the right pace.”

The training reminded her of “my dream to be either a nurse or teacher when I was young”. She enthused: “I think the idea was planted in every young girl’s mind, because we would read about Florence Nightingale. It was the ideal career choice.”

That was until “a bad experience” with needles “freaked me out” a few years later. “From then, unless I had no choice, I didn’t want to have injections,” she said. “And blood — that scared me off.”

But now, “after giving birth many times, I’ve kind of conquered my fear”, Tay said with a laugh. And, happily, in the drama, when it comes to bloody scenes, there is the props department to rely on: “It’s not real blood!”

Catch You Can Be An Angel Too next January on MediaCorp TV Channel 8.