BODY WATCH : Someone to Watch Over Me : While facing a mysterious illness, she has come to know and love ‘her’ nurses. Indeed, she says these women--these saints who take care of her and gossip and laugh with her--are ‘a gift from God.’

Just as things were getting good on Y & R--that’s “The Young and the Restless” for the uninitiated--I heard a commotion in the hospital corridor.

“How come you’re here so much? Don’t you got a job?” my nurse, Ann, shouted down the hall to someone.

A moment later my husband sheepishly entered the room. Jack and Victor were going at it on TV and I had my own personal soap opera dripping into my veins, but I knew Tony needed all my attention.

“Ann says I’m unemployed,” Tony said, as he slumped into a chair. The sign on his face said: Proceed With Caution.

My husband is in the movie business. He is very successful and works almost all the time. But when the movie is over, so is his job. That’s where we were at this moment.

“Um,” I said. “What would you call it?”

Fortunately, later that day my friend Perri came by. She is in the television business and knows how to call things by anything but their real name.

“You’re not unemployed,” she told Tony. “You’re on hiatus.” I could actually see his chest swell. Self-delusion is a beautiful thing.

On our next trip to the hospital for my treatment, Tony’s fortune had changed. He announced to Ann: “I won’t be able to come again for a long time.”

“Oh, good, you got a job,” Ann exclaimed for the benefit of the full waiting room. “I was worried.”

*

Just because you’re a saint doesn’t mean you can’t be a comedian. And my nurses are saints. I don’t use this word loosely. I’m not somebody who holds her hand to her throat and says, “Oh, the nurses, I don’t know what I’d do without them.” We spend entirely too much time together for that. My nurses, who are mostly around my age, hang out with me, talk to me. Together we gossip about who we like and who we don’t. . . .

“I can’t believe those women in the fur coats took your room,” Ann said when I arrived one day for treatment. “They just went in and put their stuff down like they owned the place.”

I had to convince her it was OK that they took the room reserved for me. Ann, who could play defensive tackle for the Giants, had wanted to throw them out. She had my other nurse, Liz, so angry about the whole thing, I thought they were going to invite the women to step outside.

On another day, after my father had gone to get coffee, Liz said: “I’m worried about your Dad. He doesn’t look good.”

“What about me?” I said, the IV dripping into the device inserted in my chest.

“Oh, you’re fine,” Liz said and raced out to see if she could do anything for my father.

Other days, as they check my blood count or “access my port”--that’s hospital lingo for putting in my IV--we calculate how long it’s been since Liz had a date, how much Ann has charged on her credit cards and if Mary Elizabeth’s baby is really as wide as he is tall.

Once Liz and Mary Elizabeth had a deep discussion at the side of my bed about someone they were unhappy with.

“Who? Who?” I asked. Not knowing was driving me crazy.

“I keep forgetting you’re a patient,” Mary Elizabeth said. “Just be quiet.”

*

If I said they were saints, I take that back. Actually, half the time I think they must be out of their minds because no sane person would choose to do what they do.

They are made out of something different from the rest of us. In the nearly five years of my mysterious illness, the nurses have been the people who support me, strengthen me, watch out for and over me at all times. And although I am only one of hundreds of people they take care of in the course of a single week, I am always made to feel as if I am the most important.

A few months ago, my nurse from my former doctor’s office came to visit me at my new digs. Also named Ann, she had switched jobs from the relatively cushy life at the doctor’s office to the hospital’s new breast-cancer center.

“I wanted to learn more and I thought this would be a greater challenge,” Ann said. She went on to describe with great joy a job that most people would liken to working in a coal mine. As Ann rose to leave, she said to me, “You really have to come over and see the place. It’s incredible.” She then caught herself. “On second thought, you don’t want to. I’ll come here.”

“Yeah, I think I’ve got enough going on right now,” I said, and we both laughed.

*

Out in the hallway, my new nurses surround Ann and I heard them give her advice and the names of nurses they know across the street. The scene reminded me of one when I first started being treated here. My doctor had stopped in to visit me. After he left, I saw him practically pinned against the hall wall, and my three nurses were grilling him. About 15 minutes later, Liz came in the room and said: “Now we know everything we need to about you.”

And what they did not know then, they know now. Who I am is just as important as what’s wrong with me. They know that I’m strong and capable, that I really want to have a baby, that I have a most caring husband and family, that every once in a while I get physically and mentally depressed, which is when they give me extra support.

These women are a most important part of my life. I spend more time with them than anyone else. And even though we have a great time together, nothing ever interferes with why I’m there and how they can help me.

I’d say the relationship is a little one-sided, but my nurses love me as much as I love them. And they know that I recognize them as a gift from God.

On my last day of treatment before the end of Tony’s “hiatus,” he stopped to say goodby to Ann. She was crouched down, carefully explaining to a little boy the different chemotherapy drugs she was administering to his older brother.

Ann gave Tony a warm smile and a quick wave and then turned back to the little boy.

“Is there anything else you want to know?” she gently asked.

Sometimes it may seem like it’s all fun and games. It isn’t.