I met up with Brydie for breakfast, had a flying visit from Lou and I headed over the road to the George to see ‘The Darjeeling Limited’. I wasn’t too keen on some of Wes Andersons other films but was really looking forward to seeing this one…I really enjoyed it.
Three American brothers who have not spoken to each other in a year set off on a train voyage across India with a plan to find themselves and bond with each other — to become brothers again like they used to be. Their “spiritual quest”, however, veers rapidly off-course (due to events involving over-the-counter pain killers, Indian cough syrup, and pepper spray), and they eventually find themselves stranded alone in the middle of the desert with eleven suitcases, a printer, and a laminating machine. At this moment, a new, unplanned journey suddenly begins.
I spent the afternoon relaxing and headed over to Lou’s house to bring in the New Year, we played cranium (which was very funny) and relaxed. It was just what I needed.
Such a terrible shame, he was a lovely guy, a total gentleman and I am not surprised in the slightest by the amout of tributes being left for him. Phil, you will truly be missed.
My nurse Sarah let me sleep quite late this morning, which was very nice. I must be getting used to the sound of the Ukranian lady coughing up a lung.
Since I had no IV anymore I was able to just potter around and get myself ready to be showered. I worked out Sarah is the only nurse who knows where the shampoo is…she probably has a secret stash for her patients.
When the Doctor came round he asked me how I felt and if I would like to stay another day or if I wanted to go. As much as I felt nervous about not having people around me all the time I knew if I put it off I would feel more scared in the long run.
The Doctors answered all my questions and while I was waiting for my medications to be put together I hung out with Brydie who came in like clockwork, giving me all her updates.
Ruth came down for her lunch and I spent a while going over my medicines with the pharmacist (if you shake me, I may rattle).
When I was done I was ready to leave and I had this overwhelmed feeling come over me, all I could do was get upset. Lou was there and Sarah had lots of kind words to say (with the Ukranian woman coughing up her last lung which made us all to laugh…I think she always has the last word…or cough in her case). I told her that sound was going to be my new ringtone. We grabbed my stuff, I thanked everyone and Lou took me home.
It was a wierd but great feeling to be going home.
I slept forever today, it was great. I was given my meds and marching orders back to my room to see the Doctor. There were a lot more today, probably as it wasn’t a public holiday and they told me they were going to have me do a stress test and also a Echocardiography which is an ultrasound of the heart. This way they could see if the medicine was working.
I had numerous visitors come in and see me before the tests and then my nurse Claire got me ready to go for the stress test. They put me on an exercise bike and got me to get hy heart rate up. I was on a ECG machine and when it hit it’s highest they injected me with Thallium.
Thallium is taken up by the muscle cells and is recorded by a special scanning devise. Areas of the heart not receiving sufficient oxygen show up as ‘cold spots’ due to the limited uptake of thallium by the heart muscle cells.
I went from that test immediately to my Echo, which is a test that provides images of the moving heart, valves and blood flow inside the heart by ultrasound. The guy who was doing this test was called Mark and he was amazing, showing me what all the pictures meant and taking lots of time to show me how valves open and close etc, totally amazing what these people do, he said that reading the ultrasound was about as normal to him as looking outside a window.
Again, I went from this test back to the room where I had the stress test, where this time I was just injected with the Thallium and scanned, without any excercise. Apparently these tests pretty much induce a heart attack. A patient who came in later in my room was telling me all about his heart history, he seemed like he had been through a lot and was dreading the tests, but I found them easy.
I had more visitors, spent a bit of time by myself, asked my nurse Lucie lots of quiestions and then before I went to bed I got to talk to one of the Doctor’s I met on the first day called Roxanna who said she had been thinking about me all Christmas and was just so shocked seeing such a young woman. She answered lots of questions for me and gave me advice on what I should do if anything else happened in the future. It really made me feel much better.
I had another bad night’s sleep. I actually don’t feel like I have anything wrong with me compared to the other people in my ward.
The woman next to me snores (that is the only fault I can find with her), the woman on the other side of the room to me is Ukranian and seems to get herself told off every other minute and the poor guy opposite me can’t even remember what day it is, so he is causing himself a ton of trouble.
Again, I had tons of visitors making me feel very special, bringing in lovely gifts and making me smile. My nurses Nicole, Lucie and Kate were just brilliant. My IV was taken out in the afternoon, so I was dissapearing into the patients lounge with my friends so we wouldn’t be so loud.
The nurse who was looking after me overnight, Kate, moved me to another room on my own as mine was pretty noisy (they were having dramas with a patient) so that was great
I slept pretty badly, so waking up on Christmas morning so tired was pretty grim.
It wasn’t so bad though, I had loads of visitors, delicious hot pot, phone calls, gifts and all day my nurses Sarah, Lucie & Kate kept my spirits high.
Today felt like doomsday…the day I would have to find out what the fuck was happening to me and the day I would have to tell my parents I had had a heart attack. It was just a mess. The first person I saw was Ruth, who was starting work early, I was given meds and I waited to see the Doctors. My nurse Lucie was amazing, taking so much time to make me feel comfortable and answer my questions.
The Doctors came round, again shocked to see someone so young but told me they would do an Angiogram to see what was going on and asked me general questions to get an understanding why this would have happened.
They prepped me and took me along to the department for the procedure, everyone was very friendly. They have all been really careful with needles and I didn’t feel any discomfort. I was expecting it to be very uncomfortable. They showed me all of the screens and explained where the blockage was but explained they didn’t need to do any further procedures and that medication should do what they need.
The girl who looked after me called Anna was brilliant, and once she had clamped me for the time required, I went back down to the ward. My Nurse Nicole kept my spirits high all evening and friends came through none stop making me indeed feel very special, bringing gifts and kept me smiling all day long.
Late Evening I called home to let them know what had happened but that I was feeling ok and would be on the mend soon. They were of course a mess but I think felt comfortable knowing I wasn’t alone.
I wolk up this morning feeling like a train wreck. I had to ride my bike to the Espy to collect my car, then go home, shower and go to work.
On the way into work I dropped into the chemist to get something as I still had really bad indigestion and my arm was feeling very heavy, like I had slept on it wrong. The chemist started working me up a little saying those symptoms were a bad combination so by the time I got into work I was a bit of a wreck.
Once all the staff were in and sessions had been started I called a girl I work with to see if she could come in early so I could go and see a doctor, I felt something was very wrong and I was very uncomfortable, as the medication I got from the chemist hadn’t worked. I was texting Lou back and forth, she was feeling rough too and I told her about how I felt.
I took things quite easy and when Sarah came in I went to see a doctor…feeling a little silly, but I wanted it checked out as the indigestion has been a problem for months. He took me seriously, did a Electrocardiogram (ECG) then some bloods, reviewed everything and told me he would get back to me with my blood tests.
When I left I crashed in front of the TV and was wolken up by the Doctor’s office telling me they got the results of my blood work and they wanted me to go to the Hospital to have things checked out. Lou came and got me straight away and we dropped by the Doctor’s office to get a paper with my results and she drove me to the Alfred.
When I walked in I saw a huge room full of people waiting at A&E, the woman at the counter was quite shocked with what she read from my results and called someone immediately saying that I had walked in and was in no pain. They admitted me immediately, did another ECG, took more blood, put me on a drip, gave me tablets and the doctor told me I had had a little heart attack. Little did I know that Lou knew this already, she had called a friend who had told her what the results meant and she had kept me so calm all this time.
At first I laughed at the Doctor, then I cried, but the nurses and everyone were excellent and keeping me informed and telling me what was happening. Ruth came down to see me, Lou went off to work and Brydie came down just before I was taken to my ward.
All night I was monitored by a sweet guy called Mick, I was scared but felt very safe.
Today I was off all day, so I was looking forward to hanging with friends and relaxing.
I met up with Lou for a bite to eat then went to pick up my friend Aana to go and see ‘No Country for Old Men’ at the Bay. It was pretty wet outside so a movie sounded perfect.
You know you’re in the middle of a great suspense thriller when a perfectly judged edit instantly transforms you from observer to participant. In the blink of a frame you are suddenly inside the head of a character where you not only know what they are thinking, you can feel it. That happens a lot in No Country for Old Men, by far the best film the Coen brothers have made since Fargo.
Quirk-free, gag-free, mercifully irony-free and often word-free, the story unfolds in a style as cool as the Texas locale is dry, with the influence of Hitchcock shimmering through every meticulously crafted set-piece.
Set in 1980 and based on a bestseller by Cormac McCarthy, the film is essentially an elongated manhunt. While out shooting antelope, a hard-faced, taciturn man called Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles upon the bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone bad. Bullet-riddled bodies are strewn among a circle of pockmarked trucks. If there are drugs here, he figures, there must be money. Sure enough, he finds it - a black case containing $2 million.
Trouble is, there are others after it, most particularly a severely disturbed gent named Anton (Javier Bardem), a low-talking serial killer. He has a pageboy haircut, a heart of stone and likes deciding the fate of his victims with a coin toss. Also on the trail is a bounty hunter of sorts (Woody Harrelson) and the crag-faced Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), a withered lawman whose skill in deciphering crime scenes is matched only by a world-weary sense that he has seen too much to care.
The film is pitted with long, largely wordless passages that thrive on the tension-building power of understatement, suggestion and carefully observed nuance. Major story points pivot on gossamers of detail - a sliver of light under a door, a mark on a wall, stains on a shoe. Hitchcock would have loved this film.
In Bardem, the Coens give us the coldest serial killer since Richard Attenborough’s turn as real-life murderer John Christie in 10 Rillington Place (1971). Each time Anton encounters an innocent party, the Coens go to considerable lengths to emphasise the homespun decency of these potential victims. It’s a very effective and singularly chilling device.
And there’s a lot of slow-stepping in the film, a genre convention used here to armrest-clutching effect as characters cautiously enter into spaces that are charged with the possibility of sudden violence. One sequence involving Moss being pursued by a relentless attack dog is among the most gripping the Coens have yet put on film.
Indeed, No Country for Old Men is so disciplined and straight-faced one can take the film as an apology for the tango of missteps they have taken since Fargo (1996).
Joel and Ethan Coen have drawn blanks with The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), Intolerable Cruelty (2003), The Ladykillers (2004), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and The Big Lebowski (1998). Like most artists eager to regain their creative bearings, they have gone back to basics, bypassing the self-conscious cinematic ticks that tainted these works and returning to the more assured, elemental style of Blood Simple (1984), their triumphant debut.
Like Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Hidden, it is possible the finale may prompt discussion as to whether the story is unresolved or if it points to a denouement so obvious the Coens felt no need to film it. Either way, No Country for Old Men is a thoroughly compelling exercise in the cinema of suspense that proves the power of the old-school thriller remains undiminished.
The film was great, we got some food, hung out and met Lou down at the Espy for drinks. I initually was only going for one (knew driving was a stupid idea) and ewe nded up at the Prince pretty trashed. I had indigestion all day long and my arm was really numb, I was complaining about the indigestion it and it just wouldn’t go away. By the end of the night I forgot all about it. The night got more and more dramatic as the hours passed and with no money left, I walked (sorry dragged) my pal home in the rain (trying to keep her on the pavement) and crashed out once I finally got home.
I managed to get to see a sneak preview this morning of Michael Gondry’s ‘Be Kind Rewind’…I really enjoyed it, Jack Black was great.
Jerry (Jack Black) is a junkyard worker who attempts to sabotage a power plant he suspects of causing his headaches. But he inadvertently causes his brain to become magnetized, leading to the unintentional destruction of all the movies in his friend’s (Mos Def) store. In order to keep the store’s one loyal customer, an elderly lady with a tenuous grasp on reality, the pair re-create a long line of films including The Lion King, Rush Hour, Ghostbusters, When We Were Kings, Back to the Future, Driving Miss Daisy, and Robocop , putting themselves and their townspeople into it. They become the biggest stars in their neighborhood.
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