My book to do list just got one longer

Henrietta Lacks.

Ever heard of her?

Me neither.

I heard this story on NPR yesterday, an interview with the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

This story brought me to the edge of tears.

Henrietta was an African American woman who lived in Baltimore.  The mother of five, she and her husband moved from rural Virginia to capitalize on the booming steel marketing during WWII.  In 1951 at the age of 30, she began bleeding abnormally and was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital, the only major hospital that accepted African American patients.

She had a very aggressive form of cervical cancer.  At the time, the standard treatment was to attach radium to tumors.  When she was undergoing surgery, doctors took a sample of her healthy cervical cells and a sample of the cancerous cells.

Also in the hospital, there was a researcher who had been unsuccessfully trying to grow cell lines for years.  It was standard to take tissue samples of patients, without the patient's knowledge or permission, for research purposes.

Well, for some reason, her cells duplicated like crazy in the lab and the researcher finally had the scientific success he'd been seeking.

Henrietta died from cervical cancer at age 30 and there is no proof that she ever knew about this.  One doctor said he told her she'd be immortal now and that she was happy to help.  But her family didn't know until the 1970s.

These cells became known as the HeLa line, the very first line of cells replicated in the laboratory.  They are still used now and there are trillions more cells all over the world than she ever had in her body.  The cells were pivotal in modern medical breakthroughs: the polio cure, chemotherapy, In Vitro Fertilization and AIDS therapies.  Those are just the highlights.

Author Rebecca Skloots spent ten years researching this book.  Henrietta's family has never benefited financially, in fact one of her five children was homeless.  Once learning of this, members of the family became bitter, pointing out that their mother directly led to medical treatments that they couldn't even access because of our health care system.

This story is heartbreaking and fascinating to me, on so many levels.  I ordered the book last night and am looking forward to reading it.  I don't think that it's about race because the researcher didn't even know she was AA and tissue samples were taken from everyone.  However, since the hospital was the only one that accepted AA patients, it can't be totally removed from race either.

But what rights to people have to control the fate of their body?  And why isn't this woman in our history books?  And do her descendants have any rights to benefit from their mother's cells, to share from the billions in profit from the pharmaceutical industry?

I don't know.  I just don't know.  But this story gives me the creeps.

Poetry Friday

St. Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

~ Galway Kinnell ~

One for the record books

I wouldn't call today my first cancer recurrence freak out, but it is the first one that I've taken all the way to the doctor.

My right underarm was sore today.  And the more I pushed and prodded, the sorer it got.  I didn't feel a lump, but I never felt one before either.  I had an hour mapped out for writing time and found myself googling, never a good idea.  Finally I said screw it and called the doctor.

Long story short.  I'm fine.

I have probably overdone it with peck presses at Jazzercise and need to back off the weights for a couple of weeks.  She did say that I did the right thing by calling her.  She told me she was glad I listened to her and that I should leave the figuring out what it is to her.

So I have my regular checkup with her in March.  Let's see if I can stay away from there between now and then.

My only regret is that I missed my day to work at the library with my son's class.  It really is the only way I can focus though.  I wonder how the rest of you do that?  Can anyone put something out of their mind?

Luncheon

Thanks to the generosity of a friend of mine, I had the pleasure of attending a special luncheon today at the Cintas Center.  The featured speaker was author Anchee Min.   She sure has a compelling story -- growing up in the shadow of Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Her stated goal is to help people learn the history and culture of China in a non-boring, non-sleep inducing way.  She is also an animated and fascinating speaker, albeit a little hard to follow sometimes.  I've been thinking over her story, especially her stories about the propaganda she grew up with about America.  I don't really know enough of the history myself to give an accurate retelling, but she discussed the way her generation was brainwashed.  I do know a bit about brainwashing and have seen first-hand that it's not something that only happens to small-minded  or weak-willed people.

When I was in high school, a good friend of mine was sent to a horrible program called Straight Inc. against her will.  She was tricked into go there by abusive parents who couldn't handle her rebellious nature.  While she was there, she was physically and mentally abused until she accepted their premises, included the insanely off base idea that she was a drug addict.  As her friend, we tried over and over to find her, but her parents told us lies.  All the time they were telling her that no one ever tried to contact her.  Eventually she cracked.  At least she cracked for awhile.  When she returned to school, I confronted her and she told me that I was one of her old druggie friends.  I had never taken drugs in my life.  

I know her story because she ran away from home and the program after turning 18.  Even on her own, it took her years to shake the lies.  I have tried recently to get in touch with her, but have been unsuccessful.   It's a terribly painful memory for me and I can't imagine the hell she's been through trying to piece together a stable life.

I say this as a testimony to the notion that brainwashing is real and all too possible.  Min talked about being told that American children were starving and fighting the soldiers in Viet Nam would help to save the children.  When you grow up with no counterpoint to that, of course you have no reason to believe it's not true.

That touched my tin-foil hat self.  I know we are not Cultural Revolution Era China, but we would be fooling ourselves if we believed that we are not subjected to a level of propaganda by our government.  I know this is controversial, but I point to the lies that lead us into the Iraq War.  The so-called liberal media played right along because to dissent was to be seen as unpatriotic in the shadow of the Twin Towers.

Don't even get me started on our ethnocentric history books, or the way that attempts to tell a more balanced story gets dismissed with a pithy "PC."

I just ask you to keep your mind open a crack.  Question what you assume to be true.  The more easily you accept something you've been told is true, the more I challenge you to question it.  All it takes is a thought -- what if that's not true?    

Special poetry Tuesday

In honor of Punxutawny Phil and, of course, the Great Bill Murray.

Groundhog Day

Celebrate this unlikely oracle,
this ball of fat and fur,
whom we so mysteriously endow
with the power to predict spring.
Let's hear it for the improbable heroes who,
frightened at their own shadows,
nonetheless unwittingly work miracles.
Why shouldn't we believe
this peculiar rodent holds power
over sun and seasons in his stubby paw?
Who says that God is all grandeur and glory?

Unnoticed in the earth, worms
are busily, brainlessly, tilling the soil.
Field mice, all unthinking, have scattered
seeds that will take root and grow.
Grape hyacinths, against all reason,
have been holding up green shoots beneath the snow.
How do you think spring arrives?
There is nothing quieter, nothing
more secret, miraculous, mundane.
Do you want to play your part
in bringing it to birth? Nothing simpler.
Find a spot not too far from the ground
and wait.

~ Lynn Ungar ~


(Blessing the Bread)

ID me please

First off, two fabulous women left comments about the testing last week.  They are definitely worth the read.  HERE is Dianne's and HERE is Ashley's.  Thank you both for sharing.  

Three conversations have been running rampant through my head this weekend.

I remember talking to a friend years ago about stereotypes.  I was raging against them and he pointed out that they are useful.  Our brains can’t approach every situation as if it were brand new.  We create little boxes for people because that’s how we stay sane. 

In my very brief stint in therapy, the dude told me that he believes I like to define myself as being unique.  He also told me that he wasn’t so sure that was true.  I never liked that guy.  He was way too nosy.

The end of The Breakfast Club.   The Geek, the Jock, the Stoner and so on.  Not really a conversation I admit, but an alluringly simple way to see the world. 

I admit that I’m guilty on both sides of this.  I am arrogant enough to believe that I know everything about a person after a short conversation.  Maybe not even that much, maybe just a 30 second study of the contents of a grocery cart.  And as my husband pointed out the other day, I tend to use the “I’m incompetent” line excuse further incompetence.  At the same time, I get furious when people think they can generalize me based on one tiny piece of information. 

Last week I went in to see my favorite intuitive healer, Anne Steffen.  She warned me about the danger of getting attached to the oppressively heavy weight of cancer energy.  I may not have worded it the same way, but I totally agree.  Extrapolating from something else she said, it’s easy to let cancer become something you are rather than something you’ve experienced.   

 It’s really easy to define yourself by the worst thing you’ve ever been through.  And sometimes it seems like the harder you resist it, the bigger it becomes.  Just like when I said I’d never be like my parents and cringe every time I tell my kids “because I said so.”  The question I have no answer to yet is, How Do We Move Beyond That?  I firmly believe that we deserve better than to be defined by the worst thing we've ever done or the worst thing we've ever been through.  My problem is putting that into practice.  I come up with some great ideas about things that need to happen but often trip over three little words:  ok, now what? 

On my way home from seeing Anne, I stopped to buy a fire bowl.  Triple Fire Sign needs some Fire.   I’m now in the planning stages of writing what I need to let go, then burning the paper.  And singing hymns.

Just kidding about the hymns part. 

Sorta.

I highly doubt there will be any goat sacrifices though. 

Not exactly poetry Friday

What follows is not poetry, but it affected me like a poem does.  It's from the conclusion of Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park, a very surreal, semi-autobiographical meets the supernatural novel.  Loved the book and have never been able to shake this section.

...everyone was too young to grasp that our life was folding in on itself -- it was so foolish and touching to think at one point that somehow we would all be spared, but the ashes pushed forward and covered an entire city with a departing cloud that was driven by the wind and kept ascending and the images began getting smaller and I could see the town where he was born as the ashes flew over the Nevada mountains mingling with the snow that fell there and crossed a river, and then I saw my father walking toward me -- he was a child again and smiling and he was offering me an orange he held out with both hands as my grandfather's hunting dogs were chasing the ashes across the train tracks, dousing their coats and the ashes began bleeding into the images and drifted over his mother as she slept and dusted the face of my son who was dreaming about the moon and in his dream they darkened its surface as they flew it but once they passed by the moon was brighter than it has ever been, and the ashes rained down earthward and swirling, glittering now, were soon overtaken by a vision of light in which the images began to crumble.  The ashes were collapsing into everything and following echoes.  They sifted over the graves of his parents and finally entered the cold, lit world of the dead where they wept across the children standing in the cemetery and then somewhere out at the end of the Pacific -- after they rustled across the pages of this book, scattering themselves over words and creating new ones -- they began exiting the text, losing themselves somewhere beyond my reach, and then vanished, and the sun shifted its position and the world swayed and then moved one and though it was all over, something new was conceived.  The sea reached to the land's edge where a family, in silhouette, stood watching us until the fog concealed them.  From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams. 

pg 306