What is the Sphinx … and who am I?: PART ONE
Prelude: Words from the Sphinx
Since 2016 I’ve had the opportunity to stand between the paws of the Sphinx at least 8 times, contemplate what he is, and look at the hieroglyphic writing on the Dream Stela. It’s a huge block of stone placed under the chin of the Sphinx by Pharaoh Thuthmose IV to honor a dream he had in which the Sphinx came to him and told him how he could become King. In the dream, he told Prince Thuthmose IV that if he would uncover his body from the sand, he would make him ruler of all Egypt. Prince Thuthmose IV did as the Sphinx asked and he became king.
Each time I’ve stood with the Sphinx to watch the sunrise together, I’ve been overcome with emotions that took Time to process. Sometimes I received some string of words with layers of meaning to unravel. The last time I stood between his great paws, I wasn’t asking a question or looking for any answers but he had something to tell me. He simply said to me, “Leadership.” It was loud. It was strong. It was booming in my ears. It was out of nowhere.
Writing this prelude, I am struck by the power of the story of the Sphinx and the mirror of this story as me, needing to uncover my Self, to be free from all that’s buried me, and somehow embody “leadership’. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but the process has begun and time will tell.
Introduction: Poisoning
Sometimes you know when you’ve been poisoned and sometimes it silently bites you in the butt. That’s what happened to me the first of April 2025 while giving a tour in Siwa, Egypt - I was bitten by a bug one night and the bites became infected quickly, causing extreme pain and the inability to sit. As time and the tour went on, infection built into a large abscess that needed to be drained. When we reached Luxor, one of the Egyptian men on our boat who spoke English and a driver took me to the hospital where, after suffering for two weeks, I had surgery and stayed overnight in the hospital. I was in so much pain, felt so alone and scared, and I cried on the surgery table before they put me under. The nurses and surgeon were so very kind and held my hand and comforted me. Then I fell asleep and when I woke the pain was intense.
I now had a two-inch T-shaped incision on my right glute cheek where 1.5 liters of infection had been drained. The incision couldn’t be stitched shut because it was a large cavity and needed to heal from the inside out. All my years working with horses and puncture wounds, I was familiar with this process but, DAMN! It HURT! The staff at the hospital were kind, and even though they didn’t speak much English, they made sure I had food and rest. One of the nurses used Google Translate to communicate with me and she was trying to ask if anyone was going to stay with me. The translation didn’t come out properly and when she showed me her phone, I read, “Is there anyone who is afraid of you?” I smiled and shook my head no, so she motioned that she would stay in the room with me overnight. I was so grateful for her kindness.
I spent the remainder of the tour in my air-conditioned hotel room resting and staying out of the 100 degree (Fahrenheit) heat, cleaning my incision and changing my dressing twice a day while the group visited the temples and sites early in the day. I would meet them to see them off in the morning and join them for dinner each night, but it was hard not to be a part of everything with them and visit the temples I loved. I was exhausted but did my best and recorded a ‘tour’ of the temple for them to listen to while they traveled to these special places I couldn’t go to with them. I felt like a failure as a leader even though they were all very sweet, understanding, and supportive. I was so blessed to have a retired nurse in our group who so graciously helped me change my dressings if I asked her too (it was incredibly awkward to do this myself), hugged me while I cried, and made me feel cared for. I am forever grateful for her kindness and support…and for also being my nurse.
The night before my flight out of Egypt I woke up with stomach cramps and fever so I had to call the hotel doctor. Even though I had only eaten at the 5-star hotel restaurant where we stayed, I had eaten something that poisoned my gut. Somehow I made it home and I was so exhausted and traumatized, I never wanted to leave home… or visit Egypt again. And if I didn’t travel to Egypt again, who was I?
Part 1: Identity Crisis
Returning home from my last trip to Egypt has been a struggle. Egypt always does something to you and you never return the same person you were when you left, but this time was different. I was poisoned, cut open, gutted, and empty. Caring family members and friends saw the mess that was me when somehow I made it home. They gently picked me up and nursed me back to life with love, compassion, and making sure I had the medical attention I needed. It’s been three months now (at the time of this writing in July) and my wounds continue to heal, the feeling is coming back into my body and my mind is starting to clear but there’s more processing and healing to come. I can feel that in my bones.
It’s taken me this long to begin to write about it. I wouldn’t say I was planning to write, but I felt that if I could write, it would help clarify my thoughts and help get any remaining poison out. I’ve always been good with words but I was so empty that I couldn’t figure out how to find the words because I couldn’t figure out what I was feeling. I couldn’t talk to anyone other than my family and even then, I didn’t talk much. I slept and went to a wound care center every day to have my dressings changed. I had to wear a wound vac to try and pull the tissue inside the cavity together but got an infection that required daily intravenous infusions of strong antibiotics to clear. Then came another unexpected surgery for another infection and another huge hole to heal. Between resting, bathing, eating, daily visits to medical facilities, a second painful surgery and another hole that continued to make driving and working impossible, I was tapped out. I cried a lot, my head was spinning, and I was trying to feel like my Self again, but I didn’t know who that was anymore or how best to find her. And who was she?
It was an identity crisis of sorts, the usual type of identity crisis you go through when the world you return to is not the same, when you are not the same, and you are questioning how you will fit and be in this new world as a new you. There is a fear of who will still be there, accepting this new yet somehow same you. I feel like the same person….I have the same skin, grey hair, and green eyes…but I sometimes scream on the inside because I also feel like I was turned inside out and back again and no one notices. They don’t notice, not because it’s their fault, but because it’s mine. I tend to only scream in the dark, alone, because I think everyone wants me to be ‘normal’ and for Life to continue on as usual.
Ever since I was a little girl I have enjoyed reading and the process of writing. I’ve always found that getting things out onto paper that were trapped inside helped my mind stop swirling. Three months is quite the writer's block to work through and since I couldn’t find words of my own, about a month ago I started to read before going to sleep each night. I read Jeremy Renner’s book, “My Next Breath” about his life-changing experience of being run over by a 14,000 pound snow cat. I thought that if I read about someone’s account of acute medical trauma and how they survived it would help me to figure out how to heal. I hadn’t been run over or been broken all over or had my eye pop out of my head in the snow, but I felt broken inside and needed the words from someone else to help me remember my own.
I also read poetry. For Christmas recently, my niece gave me a poetry book set for Christmas and I had browsed through most of them. I decided to choose William Wordsworth’s poetry to read. He described carefree walks in the countryside, wrote entire life stories about the joys and struggles of people living life, and I ate up his words and the feelings they evoked. I read favorites over and over because somehow, someone born 200 years before me had found the words and feelings that I recognized, was looking for and wanted to remember.
Part 1, a writing on poisoning and pain, an identity crisis, and how I began to find words to process it all.