I was just thinking about the paradox of the word chemotherapy—that it’s healing/curing: therapy, a word whose root has very much to do with care also—ministering; in the Iliad and Odyssey even a squire could be called a Therapon—the one who administered to the hero, putting on and taking off his armor, etc. . . .
And chemo is chemistry, potentially substances that aren’t normally encountered in the body . . . But you know what? I thought a little further in my nerdy little etymological brain, and I believe the chem part, taken from alchemy, is originally the Egyptian [khem], which is the precious fertile earth from the Nile flood, the black gold from which alchemists tried to derive the metal gold.
So, that may be something. “Ministering to the body with precious black-gold earth?”
My Student Ela
The molecule that oddly binds to a cell’s
hollow tubes, that holds them in paralysis, that stops
their wild replication.
That requires all the bark from one rare yew
in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest to save
one person. Also the home
of the rare northern spotted owl.
Now you’re up against the press of need, of cost.
The bloody essence, the drug-war
of it. Everyone’s stake. Don’t sleep under the yew
if you don’t want bad dreams. In ancient English graveyards,
where the yew’s planted
over graves, rats die. Let the roots
talk to the dead, as the Druids did. There was the woman
who only touched
the hem of Jesus’s robe and was cured.
Likewise, it turns out that simple needle-cells grown
in fermentation tanks,
a brew, an essence, is enough. But will this
life be saved? Won’t it? I ask this with reverent earnestness,
as the complicated foreignness
enters my small vein, chilly as a stream
through underbrush: Taxol, making a pressure, an ache
farther down my arm,
where the nurse places a warm pack
to loosen the valves, the barriers, to keep death’s molecules
going where they’re meant,
into the deep forest of the body,
mine, mine, only one of me in existence. Who touched me?
Jesus asked, so subtle the solution.