Part Two- Chapter 12: The Storm

Henrietta had no obituary but Gey and the people in his lab heard the news quickly. They wanted to get samples from as many of her organs as possible so they asked Day if they could perform an autopsy, this was because it was illegal to take cells from the dead without permission. At first he said no, but when they said it could help his children in the future he gave them permission to do a partial autopsy so her body would still be presentable for the funeral. Mary, Gey's assistant went to the morgue where the pathologist, Dr. Wilbur, took sample from her bladder, bowel, uterus, kidney, vagina, ovary, appendix, liver, heart and lungs and put pieces of the tumor covered cervix in formaldehyde for future use. They determined that her official cause of death was terminal uremia, blood poisoning from the buildup of toxins in the body that should be removed through the urine. The tumors that blocked Henrietta's urethra were so large that they couldn't get a catheter through to empty her bladder. "Tumors the size of baseballs had nearly replaced her kidneys, bladder, ovaries, and uterus. And her other organs were so covered in small white tumors it looked as if someone had filled her with pearls." A couple days after that her body was shipped back to Clover into Lacks Town for her viewing and funeral. Two of her cousins dug her grave next to her mothers tombstone and as she was buried it began to pour. It rained everyday of Henrietta's viewing but when she was put in the ground a storm that ripped trees out of the ground and roofs off of houses started. The family says that Henrietta was trying to tell them something with that storm.

Chapter 11: The Devil of Pain Itself

By the time September came Henrietta's body was pretty much entirely taken over by tumors that had grown on everything from her lungs to her bladder. The tumors were so bad that they blocked her intestines, making her stomach swell like she was 6 months pregnant. They took over her kidneys, causing her to have blood transfusions one after another because of the toxins that filled her body. Her cousin Emmett Lacks and about 8 other men that Henrietta cared for when they worked at Sparrows Point with Day, went to Hopkins to donate blood to Henrietta. He told Rebecca about how Henrietta's arms and legs were strapped down to the bed to keep her from falling out when her body cringed in pain. Henrietta told her sister Gladys that she was going to die and that she had to make sure her babies were taken care of, especially her baby girl Deborah. She died at 12:15 am on October 4, 1951.

Chapter 10: The Other Side of the Tracks

Rebecca Skloot traveled all the way down to Clover, Virginia to look for Lacks Town, an area where most of Henrietta's family lived. She traveled up and down the length of Lacks Town until a man nicknamed Cootie came out and asked her if she was lost. Cootie, or Henry Hector, was Henrietta's first cousin. He invited Rebecca in to tell her anything he we about Henrietta. He said that she was the type of person who cared for everyone, even when she was sick. He told Rebecca about how she helped care for him when his polio got bad, a disease that left him partially paralyzed in is neck and arms and had him in and out of hospitals since he was nine. Cootie also went on to say how most people think that voodoo had a part in Henrietta's cells. He said that spirits come around to people's homes and give them diseases. He believed that that is what happened to Henrietta because "normal cancer cells don't keep growing after the person is dead".

Chapter 9: Turner Station

Rebecca Skloot went to Turner Station, a small town near Sparrow's Point to meet with Henrietta's family. She got all the way there and then Sonny, Henrietta's son, decided not to meet with her. Skloot ended up driving around looking for anyone who knew something about Henrietta, which was pretty much everyone, but no one would tell her. She got into contact with a woman named Courtney Speed who had her watch a video called "The Way of All Flesh" which was a BBC special about Henrietta and her cells. At the end there was a scene in Clover with Henrietta's cousin Fred. It was then that Rebecca knew that she had to go there to get Henrietta's story. Sonny just laughed at her and said good luck.

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.

Chapter 7: The Death and Life of Cell Culture

April 10, 1951- George Gey was on WAAM television in Baltimore to talk about his immortal cells. He didn't mention Henrietta, in fact at this point she didn't know they were even hers, but he talked about how they would change the world of medicine. Gey hoped that the cells would help to cure or control cancer. He sent her cells everywhere there were scientists who might use them for cancer research. They went to Texas, New York, Amsterdam and even India! But that's not where it stopped. Scientists sent the cells to others and soon HeLa cells were all over the world. Even though the spread of her cells was massive, cell culture wasn't considered important by 1951. In 1912 a Frenchmen named Alexis Carrel grew an "immortal chicken heart" and made the first technique for suturing blood vessels together. They thought that he was a genius and that his medical miracle would allow man to be immortal and virtually disease free, however that was not the case. As Carrel's popularity spread he began proposing radical ideas that only wealthy, white men could benefit from his work. He even went so far as to support Hitler's "energetic measures" for preserving the superior white race. Don't get me wrong Carrel was brilliant, he performed the first coronary bypass surgery and even made methods for organ transplantation, but he was crazy. While the media frenzied around him he turned his apartment into a chapel where he gave lectures about medical miracles and his hopes to become a dictator in South America. Although many white Americans thought he was a genius, other scientists distanced themselves from him. He was reported to say that his chicken heart cells would reach a greater volume than the solar system! Back in reality his original cells died many years before. With some investigation Leonard Hayflick found that Carrel was putting new cells into the culture when he was "feeding" them with "embryo juice". So his chicken heart cells were a joke, which turned the idea of tissue culture into a joke and racism, Nazis and all the other nonsense Carrel spread around. By the time Gey actually had legitimate cells no one cared.

HeLa Cells History

so this is sort of an overview of Henreitta and her story !