She headed to Turner Station, after the strange discoveries of the town being somewhat hidden on maps. It was encouraging and inspiring to see her not worry as much about these possibilities and instead start taking the situation into her own hands. Also, given the secrecy and controversy surrounding Henrietta Lacks’ story, I was feeling a little worried for her as well, as there was always a possibility she was lured there with ulterior motives to have her stop following this story. She had gone to this place with minimal details and guaranteed plans and was having to wait around for a response. Reading the start of the chapter, I was feeling very anxious for Rebecca. It actually made me kind of angry that they couldn’t seem to figure that out. What really struck me while reading this chapter is that it didn’t seem like the doctors understood that the same HeLa cells that were multiplying so quickly in a lab were also multiplying inside their patient. We trust doctors to know what they’re doing, but we also need to trust that we know our bodies best. I think this is a prime example of why patients today are told to advocate for themselves. They later find out that she was right all along, but it’s too late to do anything about it. She tells her doctors that she thinks that her cancer is spreading, but they tell her she’s fine. In Chapter 8, Henrietta faces something that I think most cancer patients are afraid of. The personalities behind those discoveries seem to hold great power over public opinion of the science itself. Of great note, we learn about the birth of cell culture and the dark character who helped lead cell culture into the land of “racism, creepy science fiction, Nazis, and snake oil.” I think many of us can see parallels between cell culture’s publicity issues and those of more current medical and scientific discoveries. We are given mental images of test tubes in the breast pockets of pilots as they travel great distances. We see Gey sending Henrietta’s cells around the country and around the world to scientists, researchers, and physicians. The gravity of this book, published in 2010, being one of the first complete pieces of information out there about Henrietta is astounding to me!Ĭhapter 7 takes us into the nitty gritty of cell culture. He said that it did but that he couldn’t place the name. I asked him if the name, Henrietta Lacks, rang any bells. This chapter was FASCINATING to me! A few days ago, I called up my dad, a PhD in microbiology, and told him I was reading this book. I grew up in a family of healthcare professionals and scientists. The mass on Henrietta's cervix hadn't been there three months before, at her last exam, and now it was the size of a nickel.Welcome to the comments and discussion of the Young Adult Cancer Book Club! We are reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot! Catch up on Chapters 1-3 and Chapters 4-6.Ĭhapter 7. He took a biopsy of it and sent Henrietta home for the time being. The mass on her cervix was unlike anything Howard Jones had ever seen.We learn from her chart notes that Henrietta was one of 10 children and had a 6th or 7th grade education that she had one daughter with epilepsy and that she had discontinued her treatments for syphilis.Her doctor at Hopkins, Howard Jones, read her chart before examining her, and found that Henrietta suffered from many untreated conditions, including syphilis and gonorrhea.Even so, it had a special "colored" ward. Skloot reminds us that Hopkins was a charity hospital, and the only one within a great distance that would provide care to black patients during the Jim Crow era.Her only other option was to head twenty miles out to Johns Hopkins Hospital.But the doctor assumed that the sore on Henrietta's cervix was from syphilis, which she'd already been diagnosed with. Which landed her in the local doc's office.When she started bleeding outside of her menstrual cycle, Henrietta did a self-examination while in the bathtub and found a lump on her cervix.They told her it might be a pregnancy outside the uterus (ectopic pregnancy), but Henrietta knew it wasn't that. She'd told her cousins Sadie and Margaret about the knot, but no one else.She assumed it had something to do with childbirth or maybe from a sexually transmitted disease brought to her by her husband, who slept around a lot. Henrietta had been in pain since she'd given birth to her fourth child, Deborah.Part 1 ("Life") begins in Baltimore, Maryland, as a young black woman named Henrietta Lacks arrives at Johns Hopkins Hospital to have a "knot on her womb" examined.
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