While futilely setting up my classroom in October, I found a book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. A kid I don't know had written her name all over it, and I wondered what Jazmine had thought about the book. I took it home.
Henrietta Lacks was born in an old slave cabin in rural Virginia, but she was living in Baltimore when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins. She was 31 years old and had just given birth to her fifth child who had grown alongside the cells that would kill her. She liked to dance. She was buried within the year.
The small piece of her that wasn't, a small scraping of her cancer, had begun dividing and multiplying months before her death, but she didn't know it. None of her family members did, and they wouldn't find out until many years later. At that point, if we collected all of Henrietta Lacks' nearly weightless, microscopic pieces, they would weigh more than 50 million metric tons. She was 5ft. tall.
When I was in college, my gynecologist who had patted my knees and told me to keep my legs together called and told me I had HPV. I was devastated not because I was worried I'd develop cervical cancer but because I thought that was the end of my sex life that was just beginning. That same year, I learned that everyone has HPV and received the Gardasil vaccine. I will never get the strain of HPV that killed Henrietta Lacks, and it's because of her.
My mother's smallpox vaccination scar is on her left arm. It's circular, and I like looking at it. She doesn't remember getting it.
I asked my friend if she was planning to get the Covid vaccine. She said she was really nervous about it. I said I wasn't nervous at all and that I'd applied to be in the trials. It's easy to be brave when nothing bad has ever happened to you.
Then she told me this:
The smallpox vaccine predates Henrietta Lacks. She may have gotten it herself and been immune. It's impossible to know what she was exposed to in life, but every single day of her afterlife, she battles something: polio, cancers, HIV and AIDS, zero gravity in space, radiation from nuclear explosions, cosmetics, tuberculosis, experimental treatments, Covid 19, etc. in Petri dishes and test tubes.
Henrietta Lacks would have turned 100 years old in 2020. She probably wouldn't still be alive, but she could be. She might have been one of the very first people to receive the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. Or maybe if she were still alive those vaccines wouldn't exist?
I don't know how many big decisions she got to make in her life. She certainly didn't get to decide the circumstances that caused her cancer, how her cancer would be treated or if her cells could be used in scientific research. She also didn't get to decide who would capitalize off her miraculous cells. It wasn't her family. It was mostly White people, including myself, who would use them and her story to their benefit.
If she could have known that the study of that small piece of her would eradicate polio in the US within a few years and worldwide within decades, save millions of children from developing the cancer and receiving the treatment that left her in agony in the last months of her life, help people have the babies they want but can't make on their own and provide hope to billions during a global pandemic, would she have felt scared or proud? Or would she have just wanted her life to be saved?
The woman who stood in front of me in line for the vaccine was very small, and I noticed the sweatpants we were both wearing were the exact same color. The man who'd given me directions to the building would have said we were wearing red pants, but we were wearing maroon.
The only time I saw her face was when she looked back while the hospital employee was explaining to me that I couldn't get it that day. Through the shine of her visor, I could tell that she was very old and had a very beautiful face. I have no idea exactly how old, but she certainly would have shared some living years with Henrietta Lacks, and I wonder if they would have had more in common than their pants.
I'm sure the small woman got the vaccine on Wednesday. Her second dose was probably scheduled that day, too, and I really hope she can see her family and friends soon.
Henrietta Lacks, on the other hand, is still multiplying because she's infinite as long as we let her be.
https://www.npr.org/2010/02/02/123232331/henrietta-lacks-a-donors-immortal-legacy
https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/14/henrietta-lacks-hela-cells-science/
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/vessels-for-collective-progress-the-use-of-hela-cells-in-covid-19-research/
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers, 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment