It's an odd thing, to take care of someone who is chained to a bed, guarded 24/7 by bored corrections officers idling away time with TV and card games, who cannot receive visitors or even phone calls. But it happens when prison inmates are sick enough that they need care that only a hospital can provide.
As a nurse caring for such patients, the first rule I learned — or figured out, because no one said it aloud — was not to ask what the prisoner had done to land him (they were all men) in jail. Better not to know that he is a serial murderer, a vicious rapist. It was easier for me to think of the prisoners as people, just like the rest of our patients, rather than to condemn, because condemnation and compassion are tough impulses to reconcile.
I cared for one prisoner over several weeks, and I got to know him in a vague "don't ask, don't tell" way. He had an above-the-knee amputation and could walk only with an artificial lower limb, which we kept propped against the wall whenever he lay down. His other leg, the whole one, was handcuffed to the bed. He was very sick from cancer and chemotherapy. It seemed absurd.
"He's a nice guy," I told a corrections officer one day after the prisoner and I had talked.
"No he's not," the officer replied, fixing me with a level look that suggested he knew things about the prisoner that I didn't.
The guard's intimation about the prisoner's troubling past didn't change how I treated him, or even how I felt about him. But it did make me wonder if I should be more wary around him. The violent prisoner who feigns illness to break out of a hospital, killing staff members as he goes, is a recurring plot element on TV crime shows (and actually happened, in 2006, when a prisoner receiving care at a hospital in Blacksburg, Va., killed a guard and a police officer in an unsuccessful escape attempt). Was the one-legged prisoner just waiting for his moment? I have no idea. He was discharged and was readmitted several times, eventually dying in the hospital unvisited and, except for some of us nurses, unmourned.
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http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/when-prisoners-are-patients/?
