Scenes of Prison
57. Aamadu
I was introduced to an inmate named Aamadu on my first day after I transferred to the Mental Health Unit at LCC. Another caseworker was doing room checks, and I tagged along so she could introduce me to the inmates. I’d worked at the prison for thirty-three years when I moved to the Mental Health Unit, and I was getting close to retirement. I was a veteran. I’d worked in many settings at the prison, but I hadn’t yet worked with mentally ill and mentally handicapped inmates in a mental health setting. I decided to give it a try.
Aamadu was a mentally handicapped inmate who lived in a lower tier room in the center section of the Unit. When I first saw him, it was mid-morning, and most of the other inmates were out of their rooms engaged in a wide variety of activities. As we looked into DL-11, I noticed that Aamadu was lying on the floor where his bed was supposed to be, and he appeared to be asleep.
“Why is this inmate in a boat?” I asked. (The term ‘boat’ is slang for a plastic shell that holds an inmate mattress and sits on the floor.)
“A regular bed is too dangerous for him,” she said. “He has frequent, violent seizures, and we’d often find him on the floor with injuries when we’d break deadlock in the morning. That’s why he doesn’t have any teeth,” she said.
“So he’d have a seizure in the middle of the night and fall out of bed?” I asked.
“He has violent seizures, and his head strikes solid objects like bed frames. He’s had so many head injuries that when we see some new problem emerge, we're never sure if it's related to his mental illness, his seizures, his head injuries, or all three of them,” she said.
“Medical and psychiatry do their best to give him medications that will help him, but they don’t have it right yet. He still has lots of problems,” she said.
I looked into the room and thought about this inmate’s life as he experienced it living in this Mental Health Unit.
“He looks like he’s in a drug stupor,” I said.
“Yes, he does,” she said, “but we’re never sure. He’s been very violent at times.” Her voice seemed to trail off after she said this. She seemed to be recalling some frightening episodes she’d had with Aamadu, but she chose not to describe them to me. I chose not to ask about them.
We moved on to another room and more introductions, but my mind kept returning to Aamadu. The caseworker had feelings about Aamadu. What were they? Fear, dread, anger? Whatever they were, they seemed to create an empathetic distance for her. She seemed glad that Aamadu was in a stupor, so she didn’t have to deal with him and worry about what he might do next. Still, he looked pitiful lying unconscious in his boat on the floor while everyone else was up and busy.
I would soon be on my own with Aamadu, so I had to think about how I was going to deal with him. My first opportunity was the very next morning when we broke deadlock and opened all the doors. All the other inmates headed off to Central Dining to eat breakfast. Aamadu would follow them, and his inmate escort was waiting outside his room to guide him there. An escort was necessary for Aamadu, so he could find his way to Central Dining, get a tray of food, and get back to his Unit.
“Morning, Sunshine,” I said as I opened his door and turned on his overhead lights. “It’s time for breakfast.”
Aamadu rolled over in his boat and started to sit up.
“Who are you?” he said slowly, slurring his words as he gradually roused himself and looked up at me from the floor and blinking his eyes in the bright light.
“I’m Mister Larsen,” I said. “I’m new here. Say, today is a special day, so you’re in luck.”
“How’s today special?” he said slowly, carefully forming each word as if it were a struggle for him and rubbing sleep out of his eyes. He seemed to sense that I was about to tell him some wild and fantastic story, and he was anxious to learn what was coming next. I didn’t disappoint him. As I talked, I opened the individual medication packages assigned to him, and I placed pills in his outstretched hand. Next, I handed him a cup of water, and he took his morning medications. A few inmates resist taking psychotropic medication. Sometimes, the side effects are not very pleasant, so I often distract inmates while I’m giving them medication with my conversation. It helps the pills go down.
“What’s special about today you ask?” I said. “Well let me tell you, today is the big baseball game out on the big yard!”
“Oh it is, is it?” he said slowly. A slight smile began to spread across his face.
“That’s right, and I signed you up to play shortstop. I knew that was your position and that you’re really good at baseball,” I said.
Aamadu was smiling broadly now with his toothless grin.
“You did, did you?” he said, genuinely pleased now. He was stirring, getting out of his bed and walking to the door. He was already dressed. He slept in his clothes.
“That’s right,” I said as he walked away with his escort. “It’s going to be an exciting day.” Aamadu soon disappeared out of the entrance door to the unit on his way to Central Dining and breakfast.
This became our pattern. When it was time for him to do something, I would come bursting into his room with some fantastic story about something that was about to happen, and he would take his medicine and try to answer me with something humorous of his own, which, occasionally, only he understood. Then, he would leave, walking away with a big grin on his toothless face. He may have been amused by something I had said, or he may have been amused by something he himself had said, but the smile was reliable, genuine, and endearing.
One day, I was walking outside with Aamadu on the Unit compound, and I turned away from him to speak to someone on my right. Suddenly, I felt a heavy weight drop on my left foot. It felt like someone had thrown a bowling ball at it, smashing my foot against the ground. I whirled around, ready for some violent emergency, but there was nothing to see. I looked down. Aamadu was on the ground at my feet, unconscious, with his body spasming in wild contortions. He was having a violent seizure. The pain I had felt was his head striking my foot as he hit the ground. He didn’t just fall down. It was like he threw himself down and landed head first on my foot.
“Caseworker Larsen to Central Control. Medical emergency on the D-Unit Compound,” I said into the microphone of my two-way radio.
“ERTs to D-Unit Compound. ERTs to D-Unit Compound. Medical emergency,” came the all-call reply over the speaker on my radio. In about fifteen seconds the first officer arrived with two others following close behind.
“ERT to medical. We’ll need a gurney on D-Unit compound,” the first arriving officer said into the microphone of his radio as he approached us.
“Ten-four,” came the reply.
The three officers knelt around Aamadu on the ground and gently held him as he thrashed about. They tried to prevent him from violently striking the ground and hurting himself. They were especially careful with his head. After a few minutes, the officer who had been stationed in the Clinic arrived with a gurney. Aamadu’s seizure was beginning to loosen its grip on him, but he was still unconscious and twitching uncontrollably. As they loaded him on the gurney and strapped him in so he wouldn’t fall off, one of the officers spoke to me.
“He’s faking. He’s always faking these seizures, but we have to follow our protocol. It’s procedure. We should just tell him to knock it off and get up.”
“Faking!? Oh, really?” Looking down on this poor, battered, toothless, unconscious man twitching as he lay on the gurney, I thought the officer’s comment revealed much more about him than they did about the inmate.
Aamadu soon disappeared with the officers rolling him off the Unit on the gurney. He was on his way to the Clinic. The medical staff would make him comfortable until the seizure completely passed. Hours would pass before Aamadu would emerge from the Clinic, and an officer would lead him to our Unit. The officer and Aamadu would come through the entrance door, and we’d lead him to his room, and he would lie down. He’d be exhausted, and often, he’d sleep until the next day.
Aamadu had frequent seizures. They took a terrible toll on him, and medical eventually fitted him with a helmet to wear on his head as much as possible to try to reduce his head injuries. They warned us that he would not survive many more seizures. They said any seizure he had now could be his last. They also frequently adjusted his medication to try to control these violent seizures.
One would think that the cruel fates had dealt enough misery into Aamadu’s life, but that proved to be wrong. There was one more unpleasant surprise for Aamadu yet in his future, and it arrived early on a spring morning when I entered his room and greeted him to wake him up.
“Morning, Sunshine,” I said as I turned on his light and walked into his room. “It’s time for breakfast.”
Usually, Aamadu greeted me with a smile and I would launch into some fantastic and nonsensical description of what lay ahead for the day, but on this day, I was stopped short by a pained look on his face.
“What’s the problem, Mister Aamadu?” I said.
“Oh, Mister Larsen, it’s just not right,” he said.
“What’s not right,” I said.
Aamadu didn’t speak. He lowered his gaze and slowly shook his head side to side.
“Is it your stomach?” I asked. “Does it hurt? Are you having diarrhea?”
“No. It just ain’t right,” he repeated, shaking his head.
“Do you want me to get medical to look at you?” I asked. Aamadu nodded his head up and down.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s early in the morning. I’ll have someone stop by after sick call. Would that be okay?” I asked.
Aamadu was clearly in distress, but waiting was the only option I offered to him, so he said “okay.”
Sick call comes at eight o’clock, and inmates go to the clinic with passes that allow them entry. When everyone had been seen, a physician's assistant left the Clinic and appeared at our entry door. Another caseworker let her in and escorted her to Aamadu’s room. I was in the office when she had completed her examination. She came into the office to sign our tour log book to record her visit to the Unit, and I asked her about Aamadu.
“You said he was sick. All he wanted to do was show me his penis,” she said. “I'm not falling for that trick. I just told him to keep his penis in his pants and be patient. It would feel better pretty soon.”
Her report of her visit with Aamadu left me with strong, nagging doubts. I hadn’t noticed any animosity toward Aamadu from the medical staff, but this report seemed to be tinged with some negative memory of a previous encounter, and I knew he was genuinely in distress. I decided to go to Aamadu’s room and ask a few questions.
“Hi, Mister Aamadu,” I said. “So what happened with medical?”
“Oh, Mister Larsen, it’s just not right,” he said.
The visit from the physician's assistant had not relieved his distress.
“What’s not right?” I asked.
Aamadu got up from his boat on the floor and tried to stand up straight. As he did so, he pulled aside his long shirt which hung down to the middle of his thighs. When he did so, he exposed his erect penis which stood out straight from his body. The skin was stretched tight. It looked as hard as a board.
“Is that what’s been bothering you all morning?” I said.
Aamadu nodded sadly and said nothing.
“You mean it’s been like that for hours?” I said.
Again, he nodded yes.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
This time he emphatically nodded his head up and down.
“I’ll make a call,” I said, and I left him alone.
I went to the office and called the physician’s assistant who had visited him earlier. I reported what I had seen and learned. She was alarmed. “I’m on my way,” she said.
I met her at the entrance door and we walked immediately to Aamadu’s room without speaking. I opened the door, and she stepped into the doorway.
“Let me see,” she said to Aamadu. He lifted his shirt to reveal his hard, erect, painful penis. He said nothing. The pained look on his face spoke for him. The physician’s assistant turned to me.
“We’ve got to take care of that right away,” she said. “Get him dressed out and ready to leave. He’s going downtown to a hospital.”
Leaving the prison on an Emergency Medical Travel Order was a routine, well-practiced function which was now employed to take Aamadu to a hospital emergency room downtown. When he got there, a large-bore needle was inserted into his penis, and the excess blood in his penis was sucked out and discarded. The pressure of the blood trapped in his penis was relieved, and his penis returned to its normal size. Hopefully, his penis would not immediately refill with another painful, persistent erection.
I did not see Aamadu for the rest of the day. The next time I saw him, he had returned to his room and resumed his previous routines.
Aamadu’s condition had a name which I learned for the first time when he experienced it. It was a priapism. I questioned the medical staff about its cause, and I suspected that it was a side effect of the powerful medications he took to control his seizures, but our medical people assured me that his medications had not caused his priapism.
I felt frustrated because the medical people offered no solution to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again, and, as I feared, it did happen again. It happened twice more in the time I had left working in corrections, and each time it did, we dressed him out in his khaki clothing, and security officers transported him downtown on an Emergency Medical Travel Order. Once he arrived at the hospital, he was met by medical staff who were armed with the dreaded large-bore needle which they stabbed into his hard, erect penis and drained off the excess blood to relieve the pressure. Each time they carried out this procedure, they crossed their fingers and hoped that his penis would remain its normal size and a priapism wouldn’t immediately return. Fortunately, it didn’t.
When I retired from the Mental Health Unit and the prison, I left behind Aamadu to the care of those who replaced me. My thoughts often returned to him after I was gone, and I hoped that he was doing okay, but I never knew for sure. I asked about him once when I encountered a former co-worker who still worked on the Mental Health Unit. She told me that he was still alive, but she told me nothing more than that. No longer being a part of the staff, I suppose it was not my place to inquire about an inmate or for her to share any information about him, and so, to this day, I still don’t know what happened to Aamadu.
Discussion
- Life is so difficult for some people that we often wonder how they can endure. Do you know anyone for whom life is a monumental struggle?
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