Friday, July 20, 2012

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks


            The book commences with Henrietta feeling sick, in a time where doctors were poorly available to colored people, and education was a privilege, it is clear that people in this time were in wonder. She felt a pain in her stomach, which she sought to her cousins for advice; to the best of their knowledge they advised her that it was probably aches from pregnancy. When Henrietta soon became pregnant, it made sense to blame the “knot” in her stomach on the pregnancy. A woman knows her body, and as Henrietta insisted, something was wrong. She went to the hospital and what amazed me was her medical record. She had been diagnosed with gonorrhea, and syphilis prior to this doctor visit. When the doctor examined her cervix and ran tests on the lump, it tested positive for cervical cancer. From there on, the book goes into a lot of history about Henrietta and her family, which really make everything a lot clearer. What really shocked me was the amount of colored people that had been diagnosed with STD’s. It makes sense when the book explains how her grandfather and other men would take their tobacco to get sold, and would stay in a warehouse over night. Where the white were privileged enough to sleep in lofts and beds, the colored were sent to a basement and left to sleep in filth. Aside from sleeping in filth, the men would have careless fun. There was gambling, drinking, and worst of all prostitution. It makes sense that these men would possibly have sex with prostitutes and then come home have sex with their wives, and pass diseases. Who is to blame? Is it the prostitutes, the men, or society? The colored didn’t have the proper sanitary conditions, and the men mostly forced upon sex at that time to the woman. There were no condoms, no STD check, no free clinics, and no birth control. The only way you knew you had it was when you finally realized something out of the ordinary, sometimes pain, and went to the doctor to find out you had some disease. It is important to take into account how poorly educated these people were, so for a doctor to tell them they have gonorrhea or syphilis it seems many disregarded it. For some reason in the opening chapter where Henrietta’s medical history is explained, when she was told about both STD’s she either declined or never went back for treatment. As the cancer intensifies throughout the book Henrietta remains strong, and tells no one. This might have been out of embarrassment or pride.  What really interested me was the radium treatment. As it is known now radium is extremely dangerous, but this is what was used to treat her cancer. To treat her cancer they sowed a tube in her cervix, and allowed it to react, in hope of killing the cancer cells. Now it is easy to blame the doctors now that we know of the danger, but this time was a time of experimentation. All these medical procedures if not new, had little to no literature to back them up. We are lucky that modern medicine is at its prime, the experimentation age is over, and for the most part diseases can be cured. Unfortunately, Henrietta like many other colored patients were experiments. When Henrietta’s case worsened and she became a resident in her hospital doctors didn’t know how to treat her. So they attempted practically everything they knew, for the cancer, they blasted her body with radiation after radiation, which made her skin charred. For her pain they tried morphine, Demerol, Dromoran, and even alcohol injections straight into her spine. Tumors kept appearing and appearing all over her body, and still they attempted to “cure” her. When in reality they were killing her. Now for an uneducated black person at this time, it would make sense to avoid the doctor because one can say I was fine up until I went to the doctor. Going to the doctor would turn out to be “worse” in some cases like Henrietta’s, also these poor colored people knew nothing about science, and could barely if that read. They would allow the doctors to do as they pleased, because they were white, and educated. This made it easy for blacks to become experiments. Henrietta was a living experiment, and those cells that were taken from her are still alive. 

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