This letter was written by a person incarcerated at Mule Creek.
April 27, 2021
Hello PrisonPandemic. Thank you for taking time out of your day to write us prisoners and inquire about the struggle we endure. Your letter gave me hope that I thought all hope was lost.
Small things such as kindness and words of encouragement mean everything! To someone like me. God bless you PrisonPandemic. I hope this whole ordeal (pandemic) wasn’t too difficult for you and your loved ones.
I would love for the world to hear my story and have it preserved for future generations so they could look back and understand what it was to be incarcerated while in the midst of a worldwide crisis. My story begins in Jan or Feb of 2020.
I was talking to my neighbor through the air vent of my cell (like I always do) when he told me he was filling ill with something he thought could be pneumonia. I didn’t think nothing about it until about a week later when I started feeling symptoms of what I thought was a common cold.
My nose was constantly running accompanied by unrelenting cough. It was a dry cough though. I would cough for 20 minutes straight before I went to sleep and when I woke up. I felt weak, tired and my bones ached.
I went through this for a week and I still wasn’t feeling any better. I ended up telling my neighbor I have to see the doctor. That’s when he told me if I fill out a medical form stating I have pneumonia they have to come see me.
It got so bad I went to the medical building in person demanding to get treatment for my sickness that it was an emergency and they still refused to see me! They said they would send someone to my housing unit to see me later that day but never – but help never came. After two weeks of torture I finally started to get better.
How do I know it was COVID-19? Because I felt the same from the day one until the end of the second week. Usually with a ordinary cold you start to get progressively better as the days go by. Not with COVID. And it felt different from any other cold I ever had.
It’s hard to explain but it’s just one of those things you know in your heart. This story is just about what it felt like to have COVID. Now how the prison system completely failed to keep me – keep us inmates safe and establish proper protocols and procedures is a story for another day.
I hope I’m not out of line for asking you this but would you maybe help me to find a penpal PrisonPandemic? Maybe you have some friends that might be interested. I just need someone to talk to. It gets lonely in this place.
Maybe I’m asking for too much, I just had to take the chance and excuse my writing.
