Henrietta had many challenges in her life,she became motherless when she was four years old, she lived during the era of Jim Crow, and she and her family had to face her cancer illness together. Henrietta shows us how to be a really strong woman who fights her disease until her last day of life.
Henrietta Lacks was four years old when her mother died giving birth to her tenth child. Her father wasn't good at taking care of children. Therefore, Henrietta and her siblings were separated and each relative took one child because one family couldn’t afford to take all ten children. She went to live with her grandfather who was taking care of other grandson called David who Henrietta married years later. She and David had to wake up each morning at four o'clock to milk the cows and feed the chickens, hogs, and horses. They spent much of their young lives stooped in those fields, planting tobacco behind mule-drawn plows. Henrietta study till 6th grade and had her first child when she was fourteen years old.
Henrietta lived during the era of Jim Crow, where Africans Americans and white people were segregated. Black people couldn't go to places or hospitals that were only allowed for white people. When Henrietta decided to go to the doctor to see what was going on with her, she drove twenty miles to get to Johns Hopkins hospital. It was one of the top hospitals in the country and the only one that treated black and poor people.
In my opinion one of the main challenges that Henrietta and her family had to face was her cancer illness because, although she tried to keep it as a secret, her cancer was too advanced so her family had to know about it. Besides her cancer, Henrietta had other diseases such as throat infections, toothache, and vaginal bleeding, neurosyphilis, gonorrhea and increase cellular activity in the cervix.
Henrietta’s family describes her as a “lovely person always smiling, always taking care of other people and they said that she was a person that could really make the good things come out of you". I believe that their greatest strengths were being all together as a family and Henrietta’s children because she always wonders what will happen to them if she dies. Her sister Gladys spent nights without sleeping in the hospital with her even though the two had never been close, seeing Henrietta in this situation was killing her. Before, Henrietta died she told her sister Gladys "make sure Day takes care of them children” and "don't you let anything bad happen to them".
After Henrietta’s death, her family found out that the doctors had taken her cells for experiments without asking her or them, and that the cells were still alive. Her family was upset because the doctors were not supposed to do what they did. In addition they sold her cells and her family didn't get any money out of it. When Rebecca the author tried to talk with Henrietta’s family, they said that they have had enough of the situation and don't want to talk about it anymore.