“Donna’s Last Days” shined a light on the burden of cancer on the poor by telling the story of a single, indigent mother of six as she went through the final days of her life. The article showed how, as systems failed Donna, her teenaged children had to step in and take up the slack. Her 15-year-old son changed her diaper when nurses at Atlanta’s premier hospital would not. When a local hospice changed her pain medication, she hallucinated, but the doctor refused to change her medicine back to the original prescription. Even in her death, she faced insult, after a funeral home director hoping to capitalize on a fundraiser in her behalf got mad when he couldn’t get money from the six children, bringing Donna’s body in a cardboard box to a pauper’s grave in southern Fulton County. The article also raised questions about the higher mortality rates for black women with breast cancer than for other groups of women with breast cancer, making the point that poverty and social policy and structure may be to blame more than biology.”
