Chapter 8: A Miserable Specimen

It was the beginning of June when Henrietta started to complain to her doctors about a discomfort that she felt in her lower abdomen. She said that she could feel the cancer moving through her but they found nothing wrong with her. In her chart there are several records stating that she seems fairly healthy and there's "no evidence of recurrence". This was a time when doctors withheld information from their patients that they thought would upset and confuse them. They called it "benevolent deception". Patients didn't question their doctors, especially not black patient. During the 1950's segregation was still law and black patients were just happy to be getting treatment. About two weeks after the last time Henrietta went to Hopkins she came back in barely able to urinate with a pain in her abdomen that made it hard to walk. They put a catheter in to empty her bladder and sent her home. Three days later she came back and a doctor pressed down where she felt the pain and felt a "stony hard" mass. She got an X-ray and sure enough there was a tumor attached to her pelvic wall almost completely blocking her urethra. He said she was chronically ill, called for the doctors who had been working on her that said she was healthy and sent her home to bed. Soon everyone in her family knew that she was sick. Everyday Day would drive her to Hopkins to get X-rays and almost everyday a new tumor appeared. They were on her uterus, on each kidney, on her urethra, her lymph nodes, hip bones, and labia basically filling the inside of her abdomen. The doctors new that it was unlikely that she'd recover because of the rapid growth of the tumors and gave her radiation in hopes of easing some of her pain and shrink the tumors. Everyday they increased her radiation, her skin got blacker and blacker. Finally on August 8, she asked to stay in the hospital for treatment. They flooded her body with different pain medications but nothing worked. Demerol, Morphine, Dromoran, even pure alcohol injections in her spine did nothing for her. She spent her days with temperatures up to 105 degrees and stopped radiation treatment utterly defeated by the cancer. There is no record that Gey ever met Henrietta. He did want another sample of her cells but they died immediately died from all toxins that contaminated her cervix. Only one person, Laure Aurelian a colleague of Gey's at Hopkins, said that they met. She said that "when Gey told her that her cells would help save the lives of countless people she smiled and said she was glad her pain would come to some good for someone." she was only 31 years old.