Why Did I Die?

I was 25 years old when it was time for me to go on to the afterlife. You may think that this was a young age, and for your time it is. The people of Ancient Egypt only have an average lifespan of 29 years, although some could reach 50. There were many diseases we could get that infected our lungs. Breathing in sand and dust all day was difficult, and many times the water made us sick.1 We also didn’t have the same medicine as you do today. The medicine now is much better and more advanced. There were doctors in Ancient Egypt, and they did know how to do some things such as set broken bones or apply a bandage, but we didn’t have antibiotics, which make you feel better, like there are now.
But anyway, last year I was taken in an ambulance to the hospital where a doctor did a CT scan on me. A CT scan lets the doctors see what’s inside of my wrappings. From this procedure they found out many new and interesting things about what my life might have been like and when I lived. They also found out that I had died from a cancerous bone tumor on the side of my leg. This would have made if very painful for me to walk. If I walked at all, I had a very bad limp. I can tell you that I probably didn’t even know what was wrong with my leg, only that it hurt a lot. There were no x-ray’s then, so there was no way to take a picture of the inside of my leg to see what was wrong. With the medicine now, something like this could be cured. The CT scan revealed many other interesting things about my life and my culture. I’ll share them all with you in the next entries.
1Streissguth, Thomas. (2001). Life in Ancient Egypt. Lucent Books, Inc.