I woke up on the verge of death. My arms and legs burned like a forest fire. I thought my legs had been stuffed in a furnace while my arms soaked in acid. I sat up in my bed like the Undertaker. I began to panic. The sensation was so unbearable I had to stand up. As I stood in the middle of my cell, I realized I could barely breathe. I had to sniff for air.
“Ant!” I gasped, as I called for my cell mate. He was asleep. But the sound of my voice startled him awake.
“Wuz up?” He slurred his words like a drunk. Then I watched him clutch his blanket and pull it tightly over his ssahead.
“Get the CO,” I whimpered. I turned on the lights so he could see I was serious.
Ant peaked from beneath the blanket and saw the fear in my eyes. Then he jumped out of the bed and ran to the cell door. “CO!” he yelled as he rapidly knocked on the thick, metal door. “Call medical!” he demanded.
Ant knew he had to get the CO’s attention the best way possible. It was third shift. Sometimes the officers weren’t even in the unit. But on this night, the officer was at her desk. She heard the yell and the knock on the door.
“What!” she yelled back. She sounded irritated.
“Help!” Ant screamed. “Call medical,” he repeated. I saw frustration race across his face as I stood behind him. I wondered if the officer was on her way. But ten seconds later she came to the door. When I saw her face, she had the “What the hell y’all want?” look on her face with her eyes arched like a devil’s and her nose contorted like a witch. I saw her clearly, but Ant moved out of the way so she could see me.
“I…ca–n Buh-Buh–air–lee breeve…,” I whispered. I tried to tell her I could barely breathe. I felt my face turn flush-red as I stood at the door waiting for her to respond. I was already forced to speak with little air.
“What!” the officer snapped. Her voice suggested she was in disbelief. She stood there and stared at me as if she could determine the truth from my facial expression.
“Nur—sssse,” I begged. It was the only word I could get out.
Her eyes looked past me and into the cell. She still searched for a sign of deception. She did not want to be fooled. When her eyes came back to me, she stared at me again, until she concluded I was serious. Then she grabbed her walkie-talkie and called medical.
Thirty seconds later two nurses and several yard officers arrived. As they walked through the cell block door, the block officer unlocked my cell door. I walked onto the range holding my chest. When the yard officers saw me walk, one of them blurted, “He can walk. Ain’t nothing wrong with him.” I saw looks of disappointment spill onto their faces.
I walked down the stairs like a sloth. My body felt like it was about to shut down, so I had to pace myself. With all the guards standing around me, no one helped walk me down the stairs. When I reached the bottom step, a nurse clamped an oxygen device onto my finger. “His oxygen level is 100%. He must be faking,” the nurse said confidently. I rolled my eyes and shook my head. I could not believe my medical condition was being treated as a joke. My breath was still shallow, and I still felt my arms and legs tingle. I couldn’t respond to the comments being made. I needed help, not criticism.
“Please just help me,” I mumbled.
The nurse had to make sure I was okay. Preventative care was prison policy so she had me escorted to the infirmary for observation. As I was walked out of the block into the cold, dark night, a yard officer turned to the block officer and said, “Next time, if he’s not passed out or dead, don’t call a medical emergency. They are inmates!” Her words burned inside my chest like the heat in my arms and legs. What did she mean I was just an inmate? She made it sound like I wasn’t human. She seemed upset I was still alive. I couldn’t believe what I had heard.
Moments later I was in the infirmary. When I reached the infirmary, I was treated like dirty clothes. The infirmary officer led me to a back room, gave me a thin mattress, and had me lay on the floor. I was too distraught to care. I laid there. I laid there and I closed my eyes. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with my health. Unfortunately, I was surrounded by people who did not care either. All I hoped was the illness would go away.
A few minutes later a different nurse arrived. He gave me a small cup of ice water and some cough drops. I had no idea why he gave me cough drops because I did not have a cough, a sneeze, or watery eyes. Nevertheless, I sat up, took the cough drops, and sipped the water. Then I laid back down. A few hours later a nurse escorted me back to the block.
Two weeks after my trip to the infirmary, I took a blood test. When the test results came back, the test examiner noticed I had an H. pylori infection. H. pylori infection, I researched, was a bacterium in the intestines. It was contracted through contaminated food or water. A person was high risk to contract the bacteria if they were in a third world country or in a crowded condition. I was in prison, a crowded condition, and I already knew prison was a bad place to catch a disease. The prison healthcare system was ineffective.
The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the prison system’s ineffective healthcare system. When the pandemic began, prison officials had no clue how to address the issue. In Ohio, at the prison I was housed in, the administration kept infected prisoners around prisoners who were not infected. A prisoner would be placed in solitary confinement and then sent back to the block with the virus. With no regard for healthy human life, the prison administration let the virus fester inside blocks and treated the prisoners as if they were the ones to blame. But several prisoners rebutted this claim by yelling, “Y’all the ones bringing it in here.” However, the guards only smiled or chuckled at the comment. After a whole block became infected, they would place us on quarantine and lock us inside the block with no medical treatment. Sometimes medical staff came around and took everybody’s temperature, as if that could determine who had an infection; but I realized first-hand the temperature test did not work.
I caught Covid-19 when the prison administration placed an infected prisoner in my block. A few days after, I woke up around three o’clock in the morning with my head feeling like a spaceship had been twirling inside my skull. I dismissed it as a headache and assumed I had slept wrong. But I woke up that morning with an upset stomach. I had to use the bathroom. When I sat down on the toilet to release my stool, I thought a dam had broken. Liquid stool burst out of my anus as if I was spraying a water-pressure hose at a brick wall. Right then I knew I had Covid-19. A few days later, my chest clogged up and my breathing became shallow. Then my taste buds made everything taste like I had placed my tongue on a 9-volt battery. For two weeks I found myself praying for survival.
I had to pray for survival every day. From one day to the next, I had no clue if I would make it. On one particular day, I was let out of my cell to take the temperature test. As I walked down the steps toward the nurse, my body started to sweat as if my scalp had begun to rain. All over my face, sweat poured down my forehead and cheeks. I just knew the nurse would discover I had Covid once she took my temperature. But when the nurse placed the temperature device on my head and clicked the button, my temperature came back normal. I was returned to my cell as if I was okay. The prison never did a Covid-19 test on anybody unless they were forced to do one. Someone’s condition had to be severe for a real Covid-19 test to be possible.
After I took the temperature test, I started paying attention. Everyone I knew who had Covid-19 had taken the temperature test and was determined to be okay. I remember telling myself that medical treatment at the prison was fraudulent. Even if they had limited resources, they could have given real Covid-19 tests and provided those who were infected with medication. But their lack of experience in the medical field or their incompetence in their medical practice prevented them from being professional.
I am not the only one to notice prison medical staff’s lack of experience or incompetence. In an article written by Keri Blakinger for the Marshall Project, she revealed how “prisons routinely hire underqualified and even disgraced medical staff” (2021) similar to the ones I noticed when nearly my entire cell block had Covid-19. She also reported that Loyola University New Orleans law professor Andrea Armstrong said, “states often allow medical professionals who are barred from working in hospitals and private practices to work in institutional settings like prisons” (2021). With people like this being employed by the prison system, it was no wonder that the prison staff I dealt with performed so poorly.
But Covid-19 was not the first lapse in prison healthcare. It happens every day and has happened for many years, but most times it goes unreported. I remember an older man having a heart attack when I first came to prison in 2000. They had taken him out of his cell and laid him on a pile of old, dirty mattresses. He laid there gripping his chest. Instead of providing him care, they left him there and attended to another prisoner who had set a roll of toilet paper on fire. A few moments later the man having a heart attack was unconscious. I was never able to figure out if he survived. And from the looks of it, I don’t think the prison guards cared.
What I had to see over twenty years ago, I now experience daily. I am a continuous victim of prison healthcare neglect. Besides the incident where I woke up on the verge of death, and the botched Covid-19 detection, I have continued to experience rejection by prison medical staff. By December of 2021 I began to develop pressure inside my head. This pressure caused me to wobble when I walked. At first, after doing some research, I thought I had vertigo, an imbalance disorder, but six months later I knew it was more serious. From January to May of 2022, I petitioned the prison medical center where I was located for diagnosis and treatment. Instead of helping me, they dismissed my claims as anxiety and recommended I see mental health. I spent month after month attempting to receive an MRI or Cat Scan, but my pleas fell on deaf ears.
To this day, I still live inside my cell with this pressure on my head, but I have no one to help me truly fight the system so I can get treatment. I do not know what is wrong with my head. From day to night, I suffer with this pressure in my head. Now my vision has started to become cloudy. In an attempt to not exasperate the issue with stress or worry, I told myself to stay calm. “If God needs me,” I said, “then he’ll come and get me.” Once I realized medical would not come to my rescue, those words were all I had left. Now I sit in my cell every day praying I make it to the next week.
Unfortunately, the poor treatment of prison healthcare looms over not just me, but the lives of all incarcerated people. I think about the young guys coming to prison who are facing life behind bars. In their minds, their current health makes many of them feel invincible. They may not worry about healthcare right now. When I was young, I didn’t either. When I used to get injured, I felt like I was Wolverine from the X-Men. I was confident I would quickly heal every time I got hurt. However, over 23 years later, I have realized why our health is important each step of the way: the people in charge of our health care may not help us when our health starts failing. Therefore, we must preserve our self as best as possible while fighting for better healthcare together.
Prison administrations and medical directors must be challenged to save us when we need their power and skill to save our lives. We must petition harder for prison healthcare rights or the ability to seek our own care if none will be provided for us. Their choice to hold us in their custody makes them liable to protect us or to provide us with an alternative care option. This is a responsibility they took on when they incarcerated us. And because our lives are in jeopardy, we too must speak up to protect ourselves. The perils of prison healthcare must end with us, and the start of better treatment must begin with us. Then the perils of prison healthcare will stop.
Works Cited
Blakinger, Keri “Prisons Have a Health Care Issue — And It Starts at The Top, Critics Say.” The Marshall Project. 7-1-2021.
Retrieved from https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/07/01/prisons-have-a-health-care-issue-and-it-starts-at-the-top-critics-say
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