"When Deborah got to her doctor's office, her blood pressure and blood sugar were so high, her doctor was amazed she hadn't had a stroke or heart attack while we were in CLover. With levels like hers, he said, she could still have one any minute. Suddenly her strange behavior on the trip seemed less strange. Confusion, panic, and incoherent speech are all symptoms of extremely high blood pressure and blood sugar, which can lead to heart attack and stroke. So is redness and swelling, which would explain why her red welts didn't go away, despite all the Benadryl she drank. (p. 297)"
I chose this passage because it's a piece of medical information about Deborah, showing how the research about her mother's cells had taken such an awful toll on her, stressing her out to the point where she was a hair's breadth from a major medical catastrophe. All this just to know more about her mother--in the scene before this, her cousin Gary is praying and singing and preaching over her to help her release the "burden" of the stress it was causing her to find out more about her mother. It shows how much she loved her mother, how concerned for her mother's posthumous wellbeing and dignity she was, and how ignorance of medicine is dangerous for people--it gives them room to make up wild and frightening stories about what might be happening behind the scrubs and the white lab coats--making it obvious to me that informed consent and transparency in medicine are absolutely necessary to the healthcare process, just as much as the actual treatments, preventive advice, and procedures performed might be.
The questions that this passage raised for me are: How would this have been different with an upper-middle-class white family in the North who were not particularly religious? Would it have made a difference if Deborah had been given more information and had not experienced the dismissive, mystery-perpetuating treatment she had been given by the medical professionals she had encountered in her search for information about her mother, and in her own visits to her doctor. I also want to know what would have happened if Deborah was being treated for her anxiety during the time when she and Rebecca were doing their research--would she have learned more? Would her behavior have been less erratic, even though her blood pressure and blood sugar were so far out of the normal range?
"Every decade has had its landmark moments in HeLa research, and the connection between HPV and cervical cancer was only one of several in the eighties. At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, a group of researchers--including a molecular biologist named Richard Axel, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize--infected HeLa cells with HIV. Normally, HIV can infect only blood cells, but Axel had inserted a specific DNA sequence from a blood cell into HeLa cells, which made it possible for HIV to infect them as well. This allowed scientists to determine what was required for HIV to infect a cell--an important step toward understanding the virus, and potentially stopping it. (p. 214)"
When I read this passage, I immediately felt like there was a huge amount of good that has been done by the discoveries HeLa cells have facilitated. I think what drew me to it most, though, was the idea that there was the possibility that all of this research could have *not* ben done; it was like seeing a world without the advances in medical knowledge in my mind's eye. My stomach sank a little after reading it. If my thoughts on informed consent had been law (i.e., that all people should know exactly what's being done to and for them at all times, and be able to refuse treatment or refuse to give tissue samples if they want to) at the time the cells were taken, Henrietta Lacks could have refused to have cells harvested from her tumor, and the world would be significantly different now.
My questions regarding this passage are: What if Henrietta Lacks had refused to donate her cells for research? Claire mentioned this in an earlier discussion board this week, and it's something I've been thinking a lot about too--specifically after having read this passage in the book. Also: what if Day had been less prone to cheating on his wife, and had not brought home the HPV strain that infected Henrietta and eventually led to her cancer and her tumor and her death? What would medicine have done without sacrificing one innocent life for the good of millions of others? Is that really the balance that has been struck? And does that mean that each of us has an equal probability of being called on by forces outside our control or understanding to sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of humanity at large??
I chose this passage because it's a piece of medical information about Deborah, showing how the research about her mother's cells had taken such an awful toll on her, stressing her out to the point where she was a hair's breadth from a major medical catastrophe. All this just to know more about her mother--in the scene before this, her cousin Gary is praying and singing and preaching over her to help her release the "burden" of the stress it was causing her to find out more about her mother. It shows how much she loved her mother, how concerned for her mother's posthumous wellbeing and dignity she was, and how ignorance of medicine is dangerous for people--it gives them room to make up wild and frightening stories about what might be happening behind the scrubs and the white lab coats--making it obvious to me that informed consent and transparency in medicine are absolutely necessary to the healthcare process, just as much as the actual treatments, preventive advice, and procedures performed might be.
The questions that this passage raised for me are: How would this have been different with an upper-middle-class white family in the North who were not particularly religious? Would it have made a difference if Deborah had been given more information and had not experienced the dismissive, mystery-perpetuating treatment she had been given by the medical professionals she had encountered in her search for information about her mother, and in her own visits to her doctor. I also want to know what would have happened if Deborah was being treated for her anxiety during the time when she and Rebecca were doing their research--would she have learned more? Would her behavior have been less erratic, even though her blood pressure and blood sugar were so far out of the normal range?
"Every decade has had its landmark moments in HeLa research, and the connection between HPV and cervical cancer was only one of several in the eighties. At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, a group of researchers--including a molecular biologist named Richard Axel, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize--infected HeLa cells with HIV. Normally, HIV can infect only blood cells, but Axel had inserted a specific DNA sequence from a blood cell into HeLa cells, which made it possible for HIV to infect them as well. This allowed scientists to determine what was required for HIV to infect a cell--an important step toward understanding the virus, and potentially stopping it. (p. 214)"
When I read this passage, I immediately felt like there was a huge amount of good that has been done by the discoveries HeLa cells have facilitated. I think what drew me to it most, though, was the idea that there was the possibility that all of this research could have *not* ben done; it was like seeing a world without the advances in medical knowledge in my mind's eye. My stomach sank a little after reading it. If my thoughts on informed consent had been law (i.e., that all people should know exactly what's being done to and for them at all times, and be able to refuse treatment or refuse to give tissue samples if they want to) at the time the cells were taken, Henrietta Lacks could have refused to have cells harvested from her tumor, and the world would be significantly different now.
My questions regarding this passage are: What if Henrietta Lacks had refused to donate her cells for research? Claire mentioned this in an earlier discussion board this week, and it's something I've been thinking a lot about too--specifically after having read this passage in the book. Also: what if Day had been less prone to cheating on his wife, and had not brought home the HPV strain that infected Henrietta and eventually led to her cancer and her tumor and her death? What would medicine have done without sacrificing one innocent life for the good of millions of others? Is that really the balance that has been struck? And does that mean that each of us has an equal probability of being called on by forces outside our control or understanding to sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of humanity at large??
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