3 Days of Pain, Blood, and a Final Goodbye

It was a strange week behind bars.

On Tuesday, we had a staff member show up to the clinic with chest pain suggestive of a heart attack. 911 handled that one.

On Wednesday, we were winding down the afternoon when word came that someone was shot out at the firing range. The Doc grabbed the trauma bag and we flew through the various security checkpoints in record time (amazing, if you knew what we normally have to deal with). We quickly drove over to the shooting range where we found the scene exactly as advertised: a man down with a gunshot wound. I don't know if anyone actually uttered the phrase "Man Down!", that day, but if ever there was a moment where you could have, this was it. The story was, he shot himself practicing some kind of "quick draw" maneuver. The bullet went from lateral proximal thigh to medial mid-thigh. No exit wound but you could see the bulge of a .45 caliber round where it hadn't quite made it all the way through the flesh. Didn't appear to have involved the femoral artery, though there was plenty of blood initially. Considering what he was going through, he was in pretty good spirits. Someone joked with him that he'd at least have a good story to tell at his retirement party. Ah, Good Times. Life Flight whisked that one away.

Then Thursday, an inmate had a massive coronary event and died at one of the facilities. I wasn't there at the time, but arrived later to help with intake screenings for newly-arrived prisoners. Initially, they thought it was a seizure, but no. They called the PA over and he did what he could. The paramedics too. But he was a pretty sick guy, and didn't make it. I watched the funeral parlor personnel take away the body.

Is dying in prison worse than dying on the outside? I mean to ask, is it somehow more sad? More lonely?

I can't say, and I won't speculate. But if death is for the living and not for the dead, as Floyd McClure says, then in some way the man lying on the table, with only one eye open in a macabre wink, has a message for me and the others standing over his body: Come to terms with me. Come to terms with your inability to halt the inevitable. Come to terms with your own inevitable.

And most importantly, make worthwhile your freedom.

"When through the prison grating
The holy moonbeams shine,
And I am wildly longing
To see the orb divine
Not crossed, deformed, and sullied
By those relentless bars
That will not show the crescent moon,
And scarce the twinkling stars,

It is my only comfort
To think, that unto thee
The sight is not forbidden
The face of heaven is free."

Weep Not Too Much
- Anne Brontë