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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Raider
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I want to believe this is normal. Yesterday afternoon, I met with an oncology specialist. He examined the biopsy, and said that I tested positive for a BRCA1 mutation and confirmed the original diagnosis, breast cancer, and his suggestion was the same: modified radical mastectomy. He suggested we start chemo immediately, and instead I went to Egypt, to Deir el-Bahri, near Luxor. It is part of the Valley of the Kings, and specifically, the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut.
One of her many claims to fame was an expedition to Punt, which brought back thirty frankincense trees, all of which she had planted at Dier el Bahri. Hatshepsut is also infamous for her relation to the goddess Sekhmet. She’s usually portrayed as a bloodthirsty war goddess, but somehow she’s also in charge of the physicians. Anyway, Hatshepsut threw an extravagant annual party for Sekhmet that involved everyone drinking vast quantities of wine, which of course led to vast quantities of sex. Sekhmet’s relationships to medicine are a little hard to define, but a Nepalese aspect, Simhamukha, is actively involved in subduing the spirits involved with disease. I don’t believe in Egyptian or other New Age medicine- but I do believe there was something to the myth of Sekhmet. Or maybe it’s just that I approve of an ancient ritual based around bacchanalia; I’ve had my marshes traveled through a time or two. But after Hatshepsut’s reign, the “porch of drunkenness” she’d built for Sekhmet was moved to her tomb. Eventually, the porch was destroyed, likely by Amenhotep II when he was trying to erase the memory of people who might have a stronger claim to the Thutmose lineage, and her body was removed from her tomb. There have been various mummies and organs believed to be hers over the years, though there is at least one other royal Hatshepsut, from the 21st Dynasty, muddying the waters. It’s cold. Sometimes I forget that desert doesn’t mean hot all the time; deserts are hot in the day, and cold as Hell at night. Deir el-Bahri was once a major tourist draw, until the Luxor massacre, where almost sixty tourists were killed by Islamic terrorists. There’s still usually a steady stream of people during the day; that’s why I waited til night (well, that and the horrendous jetlag). As dirt grinds beneath my heel and ancient stone, I desperately want to believe this is normal, that I haven’t lost my mind, that I’m not just stuck in the denial phase of grief. That any reasonable woman in my position would also be skulking through an Egyptian crypt at night in search of some ancient panacea- because the alternative, that this disease has broken me, is too much to bear. It’s hard to explain why this matters so much. The doctors told me my prognosis is good; they’ve caught it early, and their recommended course of treatment gives me a good chance of survival. And on the plane here, I couldn’t keep from telling myself, “They’re just breasts.” And they are, and they should be, but they also aren’t. Archeology is not what you would call a growth industry. There’s a growing sense in the public that we’ve seen what there is to see, that the world holds little wonder or discovery. This has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy; believing there is little new to unearth, donors give less money, and less money yields fewer discoveries. I don’t want to be vain, but I was lucky to grow up beautiful. I’ve used that, and my considerable talents and education, to mold a very specific and very lucrative persona. I haven’t posed in Maxim, nor have I debased myself to the point of Sarah Palin winking, but I’ve found that a pretty face in combination with an intelligent quote are more newsworthy than either alone. As a consequence, I get more grant money than 90% of all other archeological researchers, and a damn sight more than any of the other women in the field. So this is as much a threat to my livelihood, which is my life, as to my life itself. I haven’t honestly thought much to my future beyond my career, but I’ve had to. I don’t want children today, but I can’t help but feel that I might, or at least want to preserve the decision to feed them myself. And as shallow as it is, and as shallow as I feel for it, I know my relationship with Robert is too young to survive such a thing. And at the end, as odd as it is to admit it, they’re mine, and they’re me; I don’t care so much about them, but I can’t shake the thought that I wouldn’t be me, or at least, all of me, without them. If someone told you to save your life they’d have to cut off a finger, or maybe your hand, I mean you’d do it, but there’s also the realization that you’d be leaving a part of yourself behind. At least 60% of amputees experience phantom sensations and pain- it isn’t just our conscious minds, it’s all of us- our brains know it, too. And there’s so much of a woman’s feminine identity that’s tied into her breasts. It’s possible I could get implants, and you can have academic arguments about the sexualization of women in our culture and whether or not breasts hold women back, but would you tell a man that he can get testicular prosthetics and expect him not to feel like less of a man? I exhale, and I taste dust, because you always taste dust in tombs. And I’d finally come to it. TV always treats the stages of grief as stages- but they don’t happen in any particular order, and in fact even the person who created it only expected someone to exhibit a couple of the stages for any one event- but that’s when I finally accepted it. I was going to lose my breasts. A sad little smile crossed my lips as I realized I’d made the most difficult decision of my entire life, that perhaps this mad journey across continents had just been a metaphor for the mental journey I’d been on. Only, that was when I noticed the sound of wood crackling beneath me. The majority of Hatshepsut’s temple is solid rock, so wood didn’t make sense. So I bounced, up and down, trying to gauge where the noise was coming from, figure out what its cause was, when I realized the sound was wood snapping, and that I was falling. The first thing I noticed was my butt hurt; I'd landed on my LED flashlight, but it seemed to hurt my butt more than the light. I couldn’t help myself as I stood; my archaeologist side took over, and I ignored my sprained ankle and stood, admiring the craftsmanship of a Sekhmet statue as my eyes crawled up the wall to where I’d fallen from. There had been a hole cut into the stone floor; Sekhmet was a goddess of bloodlust, among so many other things; woe would have found any raider caught defiling her shrine. And someone had found the thieves, and a struggle ensued. From the skeletons scattered haphazardly on the floor, I assumed the corpses were left, and a large beam put in place to hold up the new stone placed over the hole they'd cut. I coughed from the dust the falling stone had kicked up, and my eyes widened. Mummies have been proven to carry two types of Aspergillus that can cause bleeding in the lungs, and tomb walls can contain Pseudomonas and Staphylococcus. Now, normally, the dust in a tomb is more dangerous than the microorganism, but my immune system was already compromised; I covered my mouth and nose with a handkerchief. Then I saw it, at the foot of the statue, a sarcophagus with a lion's head; it had to be Hatshepsut. I traced my fingers along the edge of its ornately carved sides, but my hand came back slick. I rubbed thumb and forefinger together, and smelled: frankincense. My light followed a trail mostly dried leading to spouts high up in the walls. I could see troughs going back into the walls. I remembered the trees she'd planted outside. Frankincense trees last only about a thousand years, so none of the originals survived, and trees tapped for their sap rarely produced viable saplings- this was largely the reason the frankincense trees outside had died away long ago. But frankincense oil lasts considerably longer; 3,000 year old frankincense was discovered in Tutankhamun’s tomb, and was still viable. Carved into the wall were glyphs that told the story of women with terrible tumors on their breasts. Details of the first recorded instance of cancer came from 1500 b.c. in Egypt, where 8 cases of breast cancer had been treated with a “fire drill.” Sekhmet’s connection as a fire and sun goddess had been what drew me here. I turned my light to the statue of Sekhmet. Since Sekhmet worship involved a different statue of the goddess for every day of the year, her statues were almost universally sculpted in rigid vertical lines, always standing straight, without arms or legs in motion, to make them stronger so they lasted through the years. This statue of the goddess was different. Her arm was outstretched, but broken at the elbow. I trained my flashlight to the floor, and sure enough, the arm was resting there at the foot of the statue, and in its hand, a corroded drill. On closer inspection, I realized it was a syringe. It seemed impossible, but syringes in Egypt had existed since at least the 9th century a.d., so it was at least... possible. When I upended the syringe, fluid dripped from the needle, and I caught some on my wrist. It was frankincense, well, frankincense and a good deal of rust. I remembered reading that frankincense injections have been proven to suppress cancer cell viability... in the bladder. It’s a stretch- but then again, this whole trip has been a stretch. It seems like a silly time to stop being silly. The spouts in the tomb chamber poured into reservoirs that had a simplistic method meant to close off jars when full. I could tell that the mixture in the jars was not just frankincense, though the oil was the majority ingredient. I carry a rather extensive medical kit, particularly when I'm alone and secluded, and it had a small needle in it, for use with a supply of oxymorphone. I filled the syringe with the solution, and unbuttoned my shirt, and came to the conclusion that no, this was no longer normal. Hell, when in Cairo. The injection burned, but then again, when doesn't forcing a foreign fluid into a stab-wound not? I took as much of a sample from the jar as I could in my thermos; I thought a doctor or two I knew might be able to make use of it. I felt like a heel climbing on top of Hatshepsut's sarcophagus, but the ceiling was high enough I needed the boost. I jumped, and my fingers slid on the dusty stone floor above; I thought in that instant I would fall again, only this time onto my back, neck, or head. I'd be lucky if I ever got out of an Egyptian prison if I survived it. But my fingers held (though I left some of the skin from my fingertips), a nd I swung myself back up to the main floor. The morning air was cool, but warmer, and the sun was rising over the horizon. I wasn't sure if the Egyptian fire drill had cured me or not, but I felt prepared for whatever's next. |
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