Life in Prison (Medical)

Firstly, I want to say that sometimes I'm not exactly sure what to write about in my blog because things have become so routine for me. If there is anything you have been dying to know about my life here or the Dominican Republic in general, please let me know.

Secondly, I have broken my blog into to parts because it is VERY long. For those of you who only want medical this is the part for you. If you are looking for spiritual, read part two.

I had to opportunity to join a group (including my parents and sister) for two days to Bani women's and men's prisons in Bani (imagine that!). It is amazing how incredibly humbling the experience can be. Listening to the stories of some of the inmates, I can only thank God that I am where I am. I realize that there is little that actually separates me from them, whether it is one choice that one makes that sends them down the path to prison, or something that happens to us that is outside of our control.

On Thursday, we were at the women's prison. Here in the Dominican, they have a very different look at crimes committed by women and crimes committed by men. When men commit crimes, it is basically the same attitude as in the States, but when women commit crimes it is because the bad men influenced them to make whatever life choice led them to crime, but if they had not been influenced by the bad men, they would have not been in this situation. With this attitude, most of the women's prisons are in better condition, with better treatment of prisoners and more of a rehabilitation outlook.

Most of the women I had talked to were in for some drug related crime. I met one that was smuggling cocaine into the DR from Spain, another to Puerto Rico. I met a women from Columbia. I even met a deaf/mute women. Medically we didn't see anything super interesting: a lot of pelvic inflammatory disease. We saw one case of cervical cancer.

That is an interesting story. It was one of the guards. She brought in a lab result from her pap, looked at me and said, "I'm not going to die am I?" What a way to start off an office visit of someone you are going to have to eventually tell that they have cancer. I assured her, that she wasn't going to die, but needed to get it taken care of and not wait.

In them men's prison, there was an obvious increase in the violence that had been inflicted on the prisoners there. We saw several machete wounds. For those of you who do not know, the machete is used for everything here, from cutting coconuts to trimming lawns. It is a very common tool, which also makes it a very common weapon. Thankfully, since it is used a lot, they are usually not super sharp, but still inflict damage.

We saw one man that had two head traumas-one from being hit over the head with a machete and the other from being beaten with a night stick. Another man had horrible scars on both of his wrists from being brutally beaten with a machete. He had lost all feeling in his left pinky.

Another common injury is trauma to some part of the body due to the use of a night stick (although the ones here are more like bats). Most of the prisoners we saw had been beat at sometime by the police. Last year we saw a man who had both the ulna and radius (the two bones of the forearm) completely broken. Since he was a prisoner, he wasn't given the medical attention he needed and the bones never healed. The front half of the forearm was unattached to the back half. Now every time I see a police officer with one of the bats, that is the only image that comes to mind.

One thing that I saw for the first time, after having heard about it for 5 years, is a man with a pearl. If you don't know what this is, just ask, I'm trying to keep my blog G rated and couldn't find a website that didn't have pictures. But basically it involves modification to the penis for the pleasure of the women. I had heard about it, but had never seen it. That was interesting but very anti-climatic.