This story was told by a person incarcerated at Avenal.
UCI: Can you talk about your experience with getting COVID while in prison, like were you guys given proper medicine, or?
Caller: Nothing, yes, nothing, they didn’t, they even like, they would come do our temperature checks and our oxygen checks. You’d tell them “Hey I got a sore throat I feel really, really bad. I don’t feel good,” or this or that. And they, I, I – I’m going through the process. I got all my medical records.
And if you look at, they have them all, whenever I reported from, or, in my case, whenever I reported symptoms to the nurses like I got a really bad sore throat, I could hardly breathe. I’m running a really, really bad temperature. If you look on the vital statistics, they didn’t mark none of that down. It’s like, if you look like, oh, I just had no problem whatsoever when in reality, I was suffering bad.
And I was asking for help. But I got none, they didn’t. They hired these nurses to come in and do our vitals. But they were just there to do our vitals. Now if somebody was really, really sick, really, really sick, they would take them out to like CPC or out the hospital. But you had to be like, basically you have to fall out, you know what I mean?
And in, you know, my situation, it wasn’t an option because I have three, four boxes of legal work that I had to protect. So, I just, you know, the three, four nights when they moved me over to the 20, I just, I was ready. I just, I just said if I’m going to die, I’m going to die.
You know, and luckily, I survived but I really feel like the two times in 21 years that I got sick, that was like the closest, I feel I’ve ever been to dying, you know what I mean? It was, it’s horrific. No, no medicine. Once in a while, they turned out a bottle of Motrin. Which I think we learned that they, the doctors on the streets are telling us not to take.
