Chapter Excerpt – Free Medical Inside the Corporate Prison Vacation Getaway

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now.tuft.edu

These doctors here don’t know what the hell they are doing. They are just here. I don’t know where they find these people but I don’t think they are real doctors. The first doctor I saw told me I had an infection in my tooth when I told her about my pain. Then I saw another doctor and he told me I didn’t have an infection, and there nothing was wrong with me. I asked him if he thought I was lying about my pain. I told him that another doctor said it was an infection. I asked him if that lady was lying and he said, ” I didn’t say that.” I told him that somebody was lying and I know it wasn’t me. I could tell by his face he was mad. Who gives a shit? He doesn’t care about me. He’s here to waste time and get paid.

Everyone knows what really bad tooth pain feels like, right? Pain so bad you can’t even connect the thoughts in your brain to make sense? I was in so much pain all I could try to do was hold my head in my hands. I can’t remember ever being in so much pain before. How could something so small feel so bad?
I kept calling to go back to medical but no one would take me. There had to be an infection under that back molar. My face was all swollen up like a chipmunk. Infections can go up to the brain if they get bad enough. It was so bad I couldn’t touch my face. I gave up trying to eat. The guards knew I couldn’t eat the food they brought. I wanted to cry so bad, but when I did it just made my face throb more which caused it to hurt more.

How long were they going to let me stay like this? What was the point of it? Didn’t any of them have any feelings at all? Where does such cruelty come from? People on the outside think this is some kind of four star hotel with free food and medical. Even a homeless person could walk into an ER and get someone to pull out a tooth.

But here in the prison the inmates are ignored. Even if you had a serious illness and had chest pains they would just tell you to drink more water. That was their cure-all for everything. The bottom line is they don’t want to put out the money. It’s the prison’s way of creating more profit. They’d have to take him to a dentist eventually. Tooth pain doesn’t usually fix itself. So he was thinking there had to be someone who was maybe getting pleasure out of this. How can you let someone stay in this kind of pain and not give a damn? It takes a special kind of person to have that kind of cruelty. They were going to have to fix it at some point. Maybe they wanted you to know you were at their mercy and couldn’t do anything about it.

After a few weeks they finally decided he had suffered enough. They told him he was going to a prison hospital where there was a dentist. There wasn’t a dentist at this prison. You’d think there would be. With all the people here and the diet they ate, there had to be a lot of dudes with teeth problems. It’s not like they took them all for a teeth cleaning twice a year to maintain good teeth. That’s a joke. So, by the time any of them had to see a dentist, it was usually for a problem that was causing a lot of pain.

On the first week of this month I left on what they the call the medical chain. It took two days to get to the unit. It took so long because they pick up and drop off to other units at the same time. Sometimes we rode on a bus the call a Blue Bird or a van. I rode on both. That van is so uncomfortable. They really make it hard on us. They have us elbow to elbow in the van. On the bus if you’re not from Ad Seg you are cuffed to someone else. Yes, they pair everyone up. You might be wondering about having to relieve ourselves. There’s a toilet, so that means if someone has to go the other has to go too. Crazy huh?

When I got to the hospital I had to wait two more days because there were others in front of me. When I went in for the surgery they did x-rays. The photos showed up on the computer. The one I was going to get pulled was growing sideways and was cutting my gums. When the dentist saw the top back left one, said, “wow”. I asked what was wrong and he showed me the photo. You could see all my teeth perfect. He showed me the tooth and it was flat! The word he used was, deformed. So he asked if I wanted it removed. I was going to ask him if he would do it, anyway. They don’t allow them to put us to sleep. They’re only allowed to numb it. He worked on it for two hours! When he finally got it out, the tooth had four roots and came out in five different pieces. All that pulling and pushing and drilling just about did me in. I held on, but I almost passed out.

The bottom one hurt, too, so he had to do a little more cutting. I felt every minute of it. We had to stop. Right now I’m still in so much pain. It took four days to get back to the prison because of the weekend. When I was in the hospital they gave me Tylenol with codeine for pain before and during the surgery. Now I’m back in my own unit and their best meds are Ibuprofen. Not very effective at all.

This is the bad part. It hurts to chew and drink because my tongue is swollen. However they have me eating solid food when I’m supposed to be on a soft diet, but the doctors here won’t give it to me. I’ll eat sometimes and sometimes I can’t. I try not to give these people what they want so I just deal with it the best I can. Just know that if the pain becomes too much I’m going try the right way first to get help. If I don’t get help there is only one other way. In the meantime I’ve been sleeping a lot to try and get away from the pain.