The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks starts in 1951 with a young woman of four. She told her close friends that she had “a knot inside me”. Her friends strongly encouraged her to go to the doctor, but she denied the advice. She kept this pain from her family so they wouldn’t worry about her, and then she became pregnant with her fifth child Joe. Shortly after she birthed Joe, she started experiencing external bleeding and stated she had a hard lump inside her womb. So she knew she could avoid the doctor know longer, so her husband drove her to the only major hospital that served African-Americans. The hospital was known as John Hopkins and it was in East Baltimore. At the hospital, she had gone to see a gynecologist named Howard Jones, who studied her long list of untreated diseases. She had many untreated medical conditions, but they were never treated with proper medical treatment. During the time at the hospital, she stated that “walking into Hopkins was like entering a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language.” In the chapter we learned that Henrietta only had a sixth-grade education, then she started birthing her children. Most of her early life she spent time on a farm and rarely went to the doctor. After Dr. Howard Jones tested Henrietta he found a “tumor the …show more content…
During her x-ray therapy, two black dots were tattooed over her uterus so they doctors would know where the radiation was in her skin. When the treatment was coming to an end Henrietta was applaud because the treatment left her infertile. Henrietta was displeased because the doctors failed to mention this to her. A few weeks after he x-ray treatment she was infected with gonorrhea from David. To make matters even worse the radiation was making her frail and her strength was deteriorating. Her skin on her body would turn into a tar-like color leaving her mentally and physically