The first cut

TSL Pandorathon 4

Write on the sentence "the first cut is the deepest" interpreting it in any way you want or like, in prose or poetry or as a short story, but ending your piece with the sentence "the first cut is the deepest."



A tall tale of woes

Next time you complain about the state of modern medicine, remember this tale.
Back to the seventeenth century, Anne of Austria, the queen mother, at sixty-three years old is diagnosed with breast cancer. Automatically prayers and masses are ordained all over France, a most catholic country. As you well know, prayers don’t work.
So medicine is called, at the time cancer was considered as  a living foreign body. So the best cure was to feed the beast.
So for over a month, the court surgeon came and took a slice of the royal breast and replaced it with a fresh slice of beef in order to feed the monster residing inside. You may now think that Alien was not so far fetch. It is said that the Queen mother, never complained.
Remember no anaesthesia nor pain killer existed.
Of course that treatment didn’t work. Soon the tumour spread all over her  breast. They tried to freeze it with the application of an herb with cold properties. Didn’t work either.
By that time only one remedy, amputation of her breast and closed by the application of a hot iron! Radical if horrendous cure. Of course by that time it, the cancer, had spread to the other breast. Still not one pip from the Queen, you know the stiff upper lip syndrome, it was only another challenge sent to her by her loving god.
All remedies were solicited and examined including some salt from the Lake Ontario in Canada, supposed to petrify any living cell.
Of course the daily incisions continued, and all the courtiers were there to attend the butchery.
Eventually this regimen and blood letting killed the queen mother. It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first cut is the deepest !

Lucette C Bailliet
All rights reserved