Chapter 6: Lady's on the Phone

In this chapter Skloot starts to tell you about the journey it took her to write this book. She describes the way that the media and other reporters attacked Henrietta's family with questions about her cells. Not about her. Eleven years after Skloot's obsession about Henrietta and cells began she found a bunch of scientific papers from the "HeLa Cancer Control Symposium" which is in Atlanta. The symposium had been made n honor. Of Henrietta by a professor named Roland Patillo. Patillo was one of Gey's only black students and was Skloot's entrance into the craziness of Henrietta's life and the legacy of her cells. Skloot made contact with Patillo, who had connections to the Lack's family, and he grilled with questions about her intentions. Most people just wanted to know about the cells but Skloot wanted to know about Henrietta. So after a few days of questioning Patillo gave Skloot Henrietta's only living daughter's, Deborah, number. Deborah was excited by the idea of someone wanting to know about her mother because she wanted the same thing. The drama over the cells had caused the Lacks so much pain that Deborah had developed health issues from the stress. It wasn't an easy road for Skloot. After some conversation the family decided they didn't want her to talk to them about Henrietta and she ended up not hearing from Deborah for a year! She tried to contact David, Henrietta's husband, but he was uncooperative as well. The only thing Skloot was getting was hung up on.

Chapter 5: Blackness Be Spreadin All Inside

Henrietta had started her radium treatments and wasn't showing any of the side effects such as nausea, vomiting, weakness or anemia so things were looking good. Even her closest friends and family couldn't tell that something was wrong. She thought she would go back to Hopkins to get her radium treatments every month and no one would know. Her cousin Sadie tells the author about how Henrietta was the type of person to brighten any one's day and just a fun lively person to be around, even when she was sick. When Henrietta went back to Hopkins for her second radium treatment doctors were impressed with her progress. The tumor had shrunk and besides a little inflammation from the treatment her cervix was starting to look better. However, that didn't change the fact the she had to go back every weekday for a month for X-ray therapy. When she started going she told her family but at that point it didn't seem like there was anything to worry about. By the time her second radium treatment was over the tumor was gone and her cervix looked normal again. They thought she was cured and only continued treatment to make sure all the cancerous cells were gone. When she began her X-ray therapy they tattooed two black dots on her abdomen just over her uterus so they could be consistent with where they aimed the radiation into her skin. At first she responded well to the treatments but things weren't always good. Towards the end Henrietta found out that the treatments left her infertile, something her doctors failed to mention to her. She said if she had known she would have refused treatment but it was too late. After only three weeks of X-ray therapy Henrietta became infected with gonorrhea from her husband. To make matters worse it was superimposed on radiation reactions. As the weeks went on Henrietta's strength began to diminish. She was so tired and worn out to point that she almost collapsed on her way to her cousins home. The treatments had taken a toll on her mentally and physically, leaving the skin from her breasts to her pelvis a tar black. She said "It just feels like the blackness be spreadin all inside of me."

Chapter 4: The Birth of HeLa

In this chapter the author tells us about the process of how HeLa cells came about. The cells got the name because Gey and his team take the first two letters of the patients first and last name to put on the label for each cell sample. Soon after Mary, an assistant in Gey's lab, put Henrietta's normal cells in a chicken-blood culture they died. However, the cancer cells grew with intense speed. Within 24 hours the amount of Henrietta's cancer cells doubled. Gey thought he finally had immortal cells and he shared them with a few of his closest colleagues.

Chapter 3: Diagnosis and Treatment

When Henrietta went to John Hopkins they took a biopsy, a sample of living tissue, from the lump in her cervix. A few days after she left the results came back that she had "Epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix, stage 1", which is really just a fancy way of saying she has cervical cancer. All cancers start out from one cell that goes wrong- the cancer type is categorized by the type of cell it originated from. Cervical cancers are often called carcinomas, which grow from the epithelial cells that line and protect the cervix. At the time Henrietta came in Howard Jones, the gynecologist who saw her, and Richard Wesley TeLinde, one of the best cervical cancer experts in the country and an amazing surgeon, were in a debate about the two types of cancer and how to treat them most effectively. The two types of cervical cancers are invasive and noninvasive or carcinoma in situ. Invasive cervical cancer penetrates the surface of the cervix while noninvasive types grow in a type of layered sheet across the surface of the cervix. By 1951 most doctors believed that noninvasive cervical carcinoma wasn't deadly and thought it couldn't spread. They generally treated invasive cervical cancer aggressively and didn't treat noninvasive cervical cancer at all but later studies showed that 62% of patients with noninvasive types ended up developing invasive types when left untreated. TeLinde believed that noninvasive cervical cancer was really just an early stage of invasive cancer. Soon after a researcher named George Papanicolaou found a test, now called a Pap smear, to find precancerous cells in the cervix doctors thought that cervical cancer would be almost entirely preventable. This was a time when 15,000 women a year died from it! Unfortunately that wasn't the case, most doctors couldn't read the results of the Pap smears correctly and ended up diagnosing their patients incorrectly, causing many of them to die. This is where TeLinde comes in. He wanted to document what WASN'T cervical cancer by having doctors double check the smears with biopsies. What he needed was cell samples. So TeLinde began to take samples from patients who went to the public ward, they thought that it was okay because most if the patients from those wards were treated for free so using them for research was a type of payment. After he took the samples he would send them to George Gey, who had been trying, unsuccessfully, to grow immortal human cells- cells that continuously kept dividing and growing. Jones called Henrietta in for treatment and told her about her condition. When she went to the hospital they gave her a surgery where a plaque filled with radium* was sewed to the outer surface of her cervix; however, before he put in the plaque he took two tissue samples. Dr. Lawrence Wharton Jr., the surgeon on duty, took two dime sized samples from her cervix without her knowledge, one from the cancer and one from the healthy tissue nearby. These samples were sent to Gey's lab and would change the lives of millions. * radium was discovered in France by Marie and Pierre Curie who found that it destroyed cancerous cells. they didn't know, however, that too much exposure to radium could kill OTHER cells, cause cancer from mutations and literally burn your skin off. one doctor named Howard Kelly, who traveled the world collecting radium and carrying it in his pockets, died of cancer- probably from his regular exposure to it. although it isn't the best thing to be around regularly, radium was proven to be the safer treatment for invasive cervical cancers when compared to surgery.

Chapter 2: Clover

In this chapter it backtracks to Henrietta's life as a child. She was born in Roanoke, Virginia on August 1, 1920 and her mother was Loretta Pleasant. Henrietta had 8 other siblings and during her mothers pregnancy with her tenth child she died. Her father wasn't really the type of man who had the patience to raise children so after her mother passed he sent his children away to his family in Clover, Virginia. The siblings were all split up; Henrietta ended up living with her grandparents. There she met her cousin, and future husband, David Pleasant. She and all of her cousins worked the tobacco farms that their family owned to earn enough money during crop season to feed the family for the year. Eventually Henrietta and David, also called Day, started having children and got married in April of 1941. Soon after, their cousin Fred came back to visit from Baltimore where he worked at a steel company in Sparrow's Point. He convinced Day to come with him and earn enough to move Henrietta and the children there. Finally, when Fred was drafted overseas he gave Day all the money he had saved and Henrietta and her two children left Clover to start a new life.

Part One- Chapter 1: The Exam

Henrietta Lacks was the mother of five children, all babies were born to full term. About a few weeks after her fourth pregnancy she began to confide in her cousins that something was wrong. She'd say that there was a lump in her womb. At first she thought that it could have been from her pregnancy or the sexually transmitted diseases her husband often gave her from being with other women, until one day after her fifth pregnancy she began bleeding. It wasn't part of her normal menstrual cycle and she got worried. She made an appointment and her doctor sent her to John Hopkins hospital to get checked out by the gynecologist there. Although she wasn't thrilled to go, this was the time of Jim Crow and hospitals such as these were still segregated, she felt as though she had no other choice. Howard Jones, the gynecologist on duty that day, went over her records and found a lump exactly where she said it would be. He was surprised to find that her pregnancies went to full term; it meant one of two things. Either they over looked the tumor or it was growing at a rapid rate.

Prologue: The Woman in the Photograph

In this first little tidbit of the book the author, Rebecca Skloot, goes on to tell us about Henreitta and her cells. Most people have no idea who Henreitta even is, all they know is that her cells have done amazing things. If you laid all of the HeLa cells ever grown down end-to-end they could wrap around EARTH at least three times! Skloot also goes on to tell us how she became interested in Henreitta's story and how the Lacks family has affected her own. All in all from just reading these seven pages it is clear to see that this book is going to be good. The next chapters will begin to unravel the story of Henreitta Lacks, her family and her cells.