Henrietta Lacks

Hello everyone my name is Maria Escamilla and I would like to start off by saying that this is the first time that I hear about Henrietta Lacks. Sometimes as a student we forget that there's a whole world beyond us, full of injustices.  A lot of us have busy lives and families and we forget that there's a whole world out there; we're stuck in our own bubble.  Reading a book like this reminds me that there is more beyond ones life.  There's many people who have lived, suffered and died  so that we can have all of what we have now.  If it wasn't for Henrieta Lacks we wouldn't have a lot of the vaccines or treatments that we have now.  Although she helped us out tremendously there was still a lot of injustices that were committed against her.  Being a poor black woman and being in a hospitals full of white doctors and nurses it was very easy to get taken advantage of due to her lack of knowledge.  But what still gets me is the fact that after complaining over and over again about her pain, the doctors ignored her.  She was never informed of the outcomes of her treatment or the repercussions. She was just a guinea pig the moment she stepped into the hospital.  This is the only reason a leading doctor in cervical cancer would be interested in treating patients at a place that provided care for poor colored people; knowing that a lot of people would not be able to pay.  Being a black woman she wasn't taken serious and she couldn't question the doctors orders. Sometimes a diagnosis wasn't even given out because doctors would assume that they might not understand anyway. Although the author mentions that there is no way of knowing weather Henrietta would have been treated differently if she had been white; I think that they would have given her a choice to try something else and would have  been under constant supervision of doctors if she had been a white woman. Another person that came to mind was Elsie. I saw a picture of little Elsie as I was flipping through the pages and underneath her portrait it read that she was committed to a hospital with a diagnosis of "idiocy."  I was sad to know that no one else went to go see Elsie after Henrietta died.  I also thought it was absurd that she was even diagnosed with "idiocy." 
 I feel as though the author did a good a job, so far, at telling the story of Henrietta lacks; but I think that if a black woman would have wrote the book it could have had more feeling. The author can feel sympathy but she can never truly capture the feeling of being discriminated against. The Irony is that people became rich of her cells but her family can't even afford to see a doctor; and that an African American woman was responsible for a huge part of history in science and for saving the lives of so many people that might have hated blacks. I wonder what she would say if she could say something, because she is very much alive.