I had an echocardiogram exercise test yesterday.You know the one. You've seen it in the movies. They're worried about someone's heart, so they have him/her walk/run on a treadmill and stress test his/her ticker.
Why did my ticker require a stress test?
It didn't, probably. But I'm 46 years old, so out of an abundance of caution, I heeded the warning signs during an "incident" last Monday night.
I had been feeling some pain/pressure in my chest during the day, but nothing that worried me too much. I was able to shrug it off for the most part. Then that night, while watching whatever movie I was watching, I was snacking on some vegemite-flavored bagel chips. As though it were an exact reaction to the intake of the chips, I felt a flutter of sharp chest pains -- I described it to the doctor as "like the pitter patter of little feet on my heart, only painful." I pushed away the bagel chips immediately.
The possibilities were numerous. I could be experiencing cholesterol or blood pressure issues. I could have some kind of heartburn or indigestion. Or I might be about to drop dead of a heart attack.
I went to bed and monitored it the next day. There was no incident equivalent to the bagel chip incident, but there were a number of times I felt brief, sharpish pain in my chest. I immediately lowered my exertion level as much as I could and ate as healthily as I could. Complicating matters, it was my son's birthday, so I kept all my fears to myself. Don't want to make a trip to the hospital on my son's tenth birthday unless there's no other option.
Fortunately, one really great thing happened mid-afternoon, and that leads me to tell you about another recent malady I've been having. For the better part of a week, I had had numbness in my left foot and lower back pain, likely the result of the hard metal kitchen chair I've been sitting in all day every day since late March. I self-diagnosed it as sciatica, which I learned should go away on its own within one to three months. But I also needed to get myself some back support to keep it from getting worse.
My proper office chair arrived mid-afternoon that day, and immediately my foot and back showed improvement. It was like a cool sensation rushed to my lower back, like a bunch of nano-bots were being dispatched to the pain region and healing me with their millions of little nano-bot scalpels and other surgical tools.
The heart thing started to improve too, or become less frequent anyway. Whether the two were actually related or not, I have no idea.
The next morning I made an appointment for a telehealth conference with my doctor, which we couldn't do until Saturday. But I was already encouraged enough about my progress that I decided I could wait until then. By Saturday I felt yet better, but my doctor still had me do some blood tests, plus schedule the echocardiogram stress test for yesterday.
And I'm glad to say that I walked on that treadmill at increasingly faster speeds and steeper inclines for the better part of ten minutes, and everything looked fine.
Whew.
Last night I was in a celebratory mood. So how did I celebrate?
I watched She Dies Tomorrow.
I'm a bit of a masochist, aren't I?
I might have seen this a couple weeks ago, as it was an option during MIFF. But we didn't end up streaming that one, leaving it perfectly ready and available for viewing immediately after my own fears of death had been momentarily squashed.
Because that is, legitimately, how I felt. I was having thoughts like "What affairs do I need to get in order?" and "How terrible it would be if I died on my son's tenth birthday?" The answer: Very terrible.
That's what this movie is about. It's about a woman (Kate Lyn Sheil) who becomes entranced by some flashing red and blue lights that enter her house, and is suddenly possessed of a metaphysical certainty that this is her last full day on Earth. She knows she's going to die tomorrow. What's worse, anyone she tells about this gradually starts to believe the same thing about themselves. It's an epidemic of mortal paranoia. (Making it yet another movie released in 2020 that speaks so eloquently to what's going on in the world.)
It wasn't until I started to hear the movie discussed yesterday on Filmspotting that I became sure I wanted to watch it that night. I wanted to watch it to get more out of their discussion, so I stopped the review halfway through. But I was also compelled by how they describe the characters' feeling. These characters are steadily gripped by that feeling you sometimes get late at night, when your mind goes down the rabbit hole of contemplating what it means that you will one day die. I know that feeling. It makes your blood run cold.
Fortunately, because we are adults and rational human beings, we shake off that feeling so that it doesn't paralyze us. This movie is about people who cannot shake that feeling, and know that the day they will die is at hand.
I know the feeling both from my own life -- I still remember my first conversation about the permanence of death with my parents, and how distraught it left me -- and from last Monday and Tuesday. Did I really believe I would die last Monday and Tuesday? It's hard to say. But I also knew that if I ignored the warning signs, it's possible the moment could just arrive without me being prepared to meet it. A little negligence about my own health and it could be over just like that.
Well, today is "tomorrow." If this is the last post that ever goes up on The Audient, you'll know I have heaped some spectacular jinx on myself. Or maybe there really was something to worry about.
As for the movie, I thought some parts were extremely effective, while others were meandering and kind of without a point. I wouldn't expect anything different from Amy Seimetz, the consummate indie actress/filmmaker, who is mumblecore adjacent (and uses many other mumblecore adjacent performers here).
The effective parts will really stick with me, though. There's this line of dialogue by Sheil where she's trying to explain to Jane Adams the non-negotiability of this feeling, and she says "It just ... is." On "is," her eyes flick upward ominously, and a sinister note is stricken in the score.
If there's one thing I definitely don't like about the movie, it's that poster. It makes me queasy to look at it. The way the images overlap each other, it looks like Sheil has a huge open sore on the side of her face.
Then again, if a poster is about trying to recreate the feeling the movie gives you in a single image, well done.
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