Henrietta Narrative

I am Henrietta Lacks. I lived in Clover, Virginia.  I was married to Day Lacks, as well as the mother of five children.  I had a seventh grade education.  However, I am now referred to as the "mother of modern medicine," a title that began with HeLa.  The HeLa story began with a "knot." “A knot,” she said. “It hurt somethin awful" (Skloot, 93). I later found out that I had cervical cancer.  This cancer would eventually kill me, after many radium treatments and months of suffering.  However, not all of me has died. When I went in for my first exam, one of the doctors cut a sample from the tumor, “Jones cut a small sample and sent it to the pathology lab down the hall for a diagnosis” (Skloot, 105). My cells grew at a "terrifying rate" (106). My cells created the first immortal human cell line, meaning they have never died.  To this day, my cells are being used in labs across the world. "Yeah, your mother was on the moon, she been in nuclear bombs and made that polio vaccine" (86).  I was responsible for all these breakthroughs in the scientific field, and I wasn't even alive for it.
-Henrietta