“A lucky man is rarer than a white crow” — Juvenal
About six months before I was released from prison, I was lifting weights on the prison yard when I started to feel a pain in my side. At first I thought it was just a muscle cramp, but it continued to persist over the following days. I still continued to workout and tried not to let it disrupt my routine, but it kept getting worse. About two weeks later, I stopped lifting altogether and was only doing light cardio. Any movement that caused my abdominal muscles to contract would send a shooting pain through my right side that I tried to avoid at all costs. Did I have a torn muscle?
Three weeks after the initial pain, I bit the bullet and decided to go to the medical building. Prison on paper sounds like a socialist utopia. Everyone gets a job, food, shelter, and medical care. We want for nothing, but reality provides such a stark contrast. The reason I had put off going to medical for so long was due to a prior incident a year earlier when I had blown out a tendon in my shoulder. I waited months trying to get an MRI and see a physical therapist. I learned later that MRI’s can take years to get in prison, if you get one at all. When I finally saw the physical therapist, she looked at my arm and said to me, “Do you know what you need? You need a massage. Is there someone in your unit you trust that could do that for you?” I looked at her like she had two heads. Did this bitch really just tell me to get a massage from another inmate? Why doesn’t she give me a fucking massage? Eventually I had to settle for a cortisone steroid shot about 6 months into the medical saga, and that left a lasting impression on me. Don’t get hurt. Don’t get sick.
So there I was back at medical for a solid 3 hours hoping to get seen by a nurse. When I finally did, I told her that I was having pain on the right side of my abdomen and I pointed to the specific area. “Are you sexually active?” — she asked me. What the fuck kind of question was that? First of all, there is no consensual sex in prison, so who in their right mind would admit to a serious offense like that? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This bitch is trying to bait me so that I lose my cool and she can get me in trouble. “No, I’m not sexually active,” I said to her while I glared intensely at her face. She saw my demeanor and responded, “We have to ask that question given the area of pain you identified.” Riiight. As she started to push around my stomach, a medical student came in and they started discussing what the cause of the pain might be. Then the nurse asked, “Would you let me examine your prostate so we can eliminate prostatitis?” What. The. Fuck. I’m not a doctor, but anatomically speaking, that wouldn’t even be in the top three things to investigate given where I pointed on my abdomen. Is she saying this to fuck with me again? “No, I’m not going to do that,” I said back. She dismissed me then and I went back to the medical waiting area. About a half hour later, the medical student walked out and said that he was able to convince the nurse to give me a course of antibiotics to eliminate if the pain was caused by an infection and see if I felt any relief for my pain. I thanked him profusely for being a human being. It was rare to see acts of kindness like that from the staff on the inside. He hadn’t been jaded yet by the system. Bless his heart.
I got back to my unit and started taking the antibiotics that night. The next morning I woke up feeling like a million bucks. The pain diminished substantially and I rushed up to the prison yard to get a solid workout in. I hadn’t lifted in over two weeks so I was excited to get back into my routine. I pushed myself hard. I combined several days worth of routine all together to make up for lost time. The next day I woke up feeling pretty sore, and to my dismay, the pain was back. I decided to take the day easy and just do some light cardio again. By that evening the area of pain felt like it had increased. Not good, but perhaps the antibiotics would take time to totally heal whatever the problem was. On the third day — a Monday — things began to get progressively worse. I went to go lift and could barely finish my workout. When I got back to my unit, my temperature exploded and I started to feel weird. As the day continued, I developed a fever. “This is not good,” I thought. I tried to sleep that night but without much success.
On Tuesday morning, I woke up delirious. On my way to breakfast, I nearly passed out. Each step was a struggle and I immediately went back to my bunk. This was really fucking bad. Something serious was going on in my body and I needed help immediately. What would I do? Because it was Tuesday, there wasn’t any sick call, meaning that if you didn’t already have an appointment in medical, you couldn’t just walk in. Fuck, I’m going to have to wait 24 hours like this. As the minutes ticked by, my body was screaming to me that we didn’t have 24 hours. It was starting to get hard to think coherently. I needed to act immediately. I’m not fucking dying in this bunk.
It was do or die in that moment. I stood up, put my shoes on, and was ready to play the last card I had. I decided I would go to the guard’s office in my unit and explain that I needed to go to medical immediately. If he wouldn’t let me, I’d go to medical on the next move and pass out on the floor. It would be the last chance I had to get closer to help. As I walked into the guard’s office, he looked up. I told him that I was fucked up, that I’d been taking antibiotics but still had a really bad fever, and that I felt like I was going to pass out. He looked at me suspiciously, but I held his gaze. To my surprise, he picked up the phone and called medical. “Go on the next move,” he said. First hurdle cleared. At the next move, I started walking to medical. It was one of the longest walks of my life. Moves are ten minutes each and what normally took me three minutes took the entire ten. Sometimes the staff would lock the doors a little before or exactly at ten minutes and wouldn’t let you in. I couldn’t let that happen today. When I finally got there, I realized that I was lucky because since there wasn’t a sick call that morning, I wouldn’t be competing with the fifteen or more inmates that usually came up each day. Within twenty minutes of arriving, the same nurse who had seen me the other day came to get me. She started taking my pulse and blood pressure. My normal resting pulse is in the 50s. I was pushing 110. Same with my blood pressure. I was usually right around 120/80, if not a little under, but I was now in the hypertensive range. Well, at least this helps my case, I thought. She started to feel around my abdomen again. This time it really fucking hurt when she pushed. I curled up every time she applied even a tiny amount of pressure. The medical student from before also came into the room. The two of them started discussing what it could be. There was a debate about my internal organs. Talking in front of both of us, the nurse asked, “Could it be his spleen, his appendix, or his gallbladder?” They pushed around my abdomen again as I withered in pain. Then, out of left field, I heard the nurse say, “I need to check your prostate.” Here we go again with this fucking bullshit. But I was in no mood to argue. I knew she would send me back to my unit if I didn’t comply. So I turned over and let her stick a finger in my ass. Sure enough, not the culprit. She talked to the medical student some more and then turned to me. “I need you to stand up and jump,” she said to me. I knew this was a real test for appendicitis, but it still frustrated me given that I was fighting to stay conscious and coherent on an examining table, and now they wanted me to stand up and jump. But same as the prostate check, I was willing to do anything to get help. I stood up and was really dizzy. I jumped. It hurt. I laid back down. They brought in two more people. No one in the room was a doctor. The doctor would not see me despite my condition. The other two people started poking my abdomen. I huddled into the fetal position in pain.
I’d been there for almost two hours at that point. The four staff members took turns discussing what to do inside the room and then in pairs outside the room. Finally the four of them came back into the room and I heard the nurse say, “Should we send him back to his unit and see how he does or should we call an ambulance?” How could those two extremes be the choices in her head? If calling an ambulance was one of the choices, then shouldn’t the other be monitoring me at medical? Was she seriously considering sending me back to my unit? Thoughts began racing through my head. My body was telling me that if I went back to my unit, that would be the end. Then my mind went to the last card I had left to play: I could hurt myself. Inmates know that if you can’t get medical help, if you inflict enough damage to your own body where you require outside medical attention, they have no choice but to take you to an outside hospital. Prison guards and staff don’t like it when someone dies in the prison because it means an investigation. There have been many instances where an inmate was already dead in the unit and the staff called an ambulance — afterwards reporting that the inmate died in the ambulance. Anything to avoid the paperwork and scrutiny.
I started to look around the room. Perhaps if I acted quickly enough, I could stand on the medical table and jump off head first into the floor. That would probably do enough damage. But it could also do too much damage. What if I seriously injured my neck or spine and became paralyzed? Or what if I fractured my skull? I went back to scanning the room for other possible solutions. I thought about the waiting room. There was a glass door that wasn’t barred like the rest of the doors. I could try to run through it or try to punch through it. Once shattered, I could run my arms along the jagged glass to slice open all the veins on my arms. I can’t tell you how fucked up it feels when you get to the desperate point of planning how to seriously hurt yourself so that you can get help. It’s the despair of knowing you’ve tried everything, but still have the will to survive and that the only way to do that is to risk dying in some other way.
But then a voice snapped me out of my thoughts. It was the medical student — the same one who had given me antibiotics several days ago despite the skepticism and hesitation of the nurse. As the nurse was still debating whether I should go back to my unit, he responded to her, “If his appendix bursts and we send him back to his unit he could die.” The nurse thought about that. With a cold indifference, she left the room and started talking to the other staff about what to do next. When she came back in, she informed me that an ambulance had been called. That medical student saved my life.
They shackled me up and put me in the suicide watch holding cell while I waited for the ambulance to arrive. I’d never been in this cell before but had heard a lot about it. It had a concrete slab in the middle of it with some fixtures along the side that were used to restrain inmates. I was glad I got to see it under better circumstances than most who ended up there.
Finally, after a little more than three hours from when I had set foot in the medical building, the paramedics arrived. A guard opened the suicide watch cell and escorted me to the stretcher. Once I was laying down, I was belted several times across my waist and chained to the stretcher to prevent me from moving. The paramedics wheeled me to the ambulance waiting outside the fence. Everything started to become surreal. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the pain or because I was outside of the prison. I hadn’t been outside a fence in over three years at that point. As the ambulance rushed to the hospital, I looked out the back window of the ambulance at the road passing behind me, along with the sprawling forests and hills. If I survived this, I would soon get to see those forests and hills again.
About 20 minutes later, two guards from the prison who had followed in a van behind the ambulance assisted the paramedics in getting me from the stretcher to a wheelchair. Once I was situated in the chair, I was wheeled into a room in the ER. Because I was an inmate, I was put in a room that was cordoned off so that people outside the room could not see inside. When I got to the room, the guards transferred me from the wheel chair to the hospital bed where I was cuffed to the bed. At long last, a doctor arrived and started to examine me. He applied pressure to my abdomen the way the nurse had done and checked my vitals. Then out of left field he said, “I need to check your prostate.” Not this shit again. I looked at him and said, “I already had it looked at a few hours earlier in the medical at the prison.” He looked back at me and said, “But I didn’t look at it.” What the fuck was with these people and my prostate? He put on a glove and for the second time that day, I got another finger in my ass. After he pulled the glove off, he said to no one in particular, “Well, nothing wrong there.” No shit.
When the doctor left the room it was just me and the two guards who had brought me into the hospital. I would be under constant surveillance the entire time I was outside the prison, even if I had to piss or shit. As I laid there trying to rest, I heard one guard say to the other, “I think he’s faking it.” Fuck you, I thought. About 10 minutes later, I was escorted to another room in the hospital where I was informed I would be getting a CT scan of my abdomen. Hopefully this would reveal the culprit. After completing the scan I was wheeled to the ER. Not too long after I got back, two men in lab coats walked into the room. The first man informed me that he was a surgeon and the second said that he was a medical student. “You have acute appendicitis and we have to operate,” said the surgeon. “Well, I guess he wasn’t faking it,” said one guard to the other.
A few hours later, my bed was wheeled to a room where they prepared me for the operation. Since a guard had to be with me at all times, that meant one of them had to gown up and go into the operating room with me. It trips me out even now to think there was a man with a gun in the operating room while I was getting my appendix removed. As I was injected with anesthesia, I felt relief knowing that I had done everything within my power to get help and that I was in an outside hospital. And then I drifted to sleep.
When I woke up I immediately felt the pain from the operation. At least I’m alive, I thought. I tried to rest but it was tough to get comfortable with the handcuff on my left arm that was attached to the bed, which made it tough to roll over and adjust every time I wanted to move. Peeing was awful. I had a catheter during the operation that they’d removed and now there was a blockage. To actually pee, I needed to push, which meant feeling the excruciating pain coming from my abdomen. Thank god I didn’t have to shit. I spent about twelve hours tossing and turning while the guards switched shifts and talked or watched television. As soon as I was able to stand up, they wanted me out of there. I had heard the stories about the delicious hospital meals (everything’s delicious compared to prison food), so I tried to eat a meal before I had to go. It didn’t go very well because of the nausea I had, but I didn’t want to let the opportunity go to waste. As I was driven back to the prison in the back of a holding van, it took everything not to throw up all over it. That wouldn’t have made the guards happy.
When I got back to prison, they thankfully had a wheelchair for me to wheel me from the front office to medical. I didn’t know if I would’ve been able to walk back without help. While I was waiting in medical, I was overcome with nausea and dizziness and couldn’t sit up so I laid down on the bench. A few minutes later a staff member came over to me and said, “No laying down in the lobby.” Never mind the hospital bracelet I was wearing or the dazed expression on my face. I quickly remembered where I was.
The walk back from medical to my unit felt like it was ten miles away. It made me empathize with those on the compound who were disabled or in a ton of physical pain and had to make the trek every day to take their prescriptions. I entered my unit like the walking dead and saw a few friends on the way back to my bunk. The good will that they offered in trying to help me made me grateful to have the support despite the environment I found myself in. For all of it’s flaws, suffering, and injustice, prison was the first place where I saw and felt a community.
I’m not bitter about any of the events that happened because I know how lucky I am. Earlier that year, another inmate in my unit had been complaining about a pain in his stomach for months. He started to look yellow and had lost a ton of weight. You didn’t have to be a doctor to know that something was seriously wrong. When they finally took him to an outside hospital they found a tumor the size of a football in his abdomen. After they took a biopsy, they told him not to worry as it wasn’t cancerous. He came back to the unit after that and his condition continued to deteriorate. He would moan in agony at night, unable to sleep from the pain. A few weeks later, he collapsed and was rushed to a different hospital. When they examined him this time, they found even more tumors. Somehow, the first hospital had missed what was glaringly obvious to the doctors at the second hospital. When the second biopsy came back, they informed him that he had cancer that had spread throughout his entire body. Yet again, they discharged him back to prison. At that point, he looked like a corpse. His skin was completely discolored and hung from his bones from all the weight he had lost. He needed a wheelchair and couldn’t sleep at all because of the intense pain. Other inmates began to get frustrated at his circumstance. The prison medical wasn’t giving him pain medication, and treatment was delayed into a future he didn’t have. A few weeks later, he collapsed again and was taken to a hospital where he died a few days later. He was less than a year away from his release after serving nine years. Sadly this man’s story is not unique. There are many instances just like it happening all across America.
There are no villains in this story. As easy as it would be to hate and be angry at the medical staff, it’s just not that simple. For all of their faults, many of these staff members start their jobs with a happy demeanor and positive or neutral attitude towards inmates. But it is difficult for this initial attitude to survive over the years and decades that they will work in a prison. Inmates are in a constant battle of losing privileges that almost never return, all because one inmate ruined it for everybody else. This takes its toll on the staff too. In medical, all it can take is one inmate trying to get drugs, harassing a female nurse, or some other negative incident to jade that individual into being suspicious of all inmates for the rest of their career. Each subsequent incident further validates that initial suspicion regardless of how much time occurs between the two.
Sometimes I think about the medical student who helped me and where he is today. I wonder if he’s become jaded or not. He reminds me that there are good people everywhere, even in seemingly adversarial relationships like inmates and staff members. Adversity and bitterness can make it very easy to write off all people in a certain group, but life is rarely that simple. I’m just grateful for his intervention when my life was hanging in the balance and the ripple effect of his actions to help me see the good in others.
