Medical Care
I received some of the best and some of the worst medical care while I was in jail. Policies had clearly changed between the first and last times I was there. I suspect this had to do with the dead inmate that got head counted twice. Because my blood pressure was an issue it was checked every other day. Medications were distributed three times each day when a nurse would come on the block with the “med cart.” We would stand in line and get whatever we had been prescribed. Once we swallowed the drugs we had to open our mouths to prove that we had done so. Mental health drugs like the Zoloft I took were crushed and mixed with water as some inmates would hide the pills under their tongue instead of swallowing them.
The problem always came when I initially arrived. It seemed that they had a very weird procedure for figuring out what medications you were supposed to be taking. The time I was put on Level 2 suicide watch, they kept giving me Seroquel and not Zoloft. I kept telling them this was wrong and they could easily call my doctor to verify my story. I was told that wasn’t how they did things. Later I learned that they actually talked to pharmacies to get a list of a new inmate’s prescriptions. The pharmacy told them I was still supposed to be taking Seroquel which I had taken briefly a few months prior and that I had not refilled my Zoloft prescription in six months. The jail policy was apparently not to provide medications inmates were supposed to take but did not.
I had not filled the Zoloft prescription in so long because the mail-order pharmacy had twice mistakenly sent me a six-month supply instead of a three-month supply. After talking to my doctor I had stopped taking Seroquel because of the side effects. It did two things to me. First, it made me extremely tired which is what it should do. Second, it made me extremely jittery and shaky. Thus, I couldn’t sleep even though I was so tired I could barely function. I would stumble around my cell for most of the night because I couldn’t stop my legs from shaking when I laid down. I would eventually crash. This didn’t help with me trying to convince them my mental health was fine. They kept telling me that if I refused to take my medication they would not take me off suicide-watch. For me, being on suicide watch while under the influence of Seroquel was a nightmare. I eventually had to get my attorney involved to get this all sorted out.
When you first arrive in jail you’re given a tuberculosis test and quarantined for 48 hours to make sure you were free of the virus. I’m guessing there are all kinds of new protocols to test for the coronavirus. I think the quarantine also gave the jail staff an opportunity to see if you were sick in general. I never got sick while in jail and do not recall anyone else ever being sick (besides having withdrawal symptoms). The jail was especially worried about MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and there were posters everywhere of very nasty-looking infections. I did see a few injuries happen in jail and other ailments. One guy really messed up his knee playing basketball. One of my cellmates had an infected tooth that was extremely painful and needed to be extracted. He waited a long time to get that tooth pulled. I think a dentist came once a month for dental work.