tagged w/ healthwellness
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Women inmates die and suffer from medical neglect in a prison system that is much more of a threat to them than they are to anyone else.
My name is Janice Pugh. I was released from FMC Carswell [the only federal prison facility in the U.S. that includes a hospital for inmates] on January 10, 2000. ... The reason for me being at Carswell was for medical treatment. I have a history of lung cancer. ... The last six months I was coughing up blood, and a lot of it. ... There was sputum tests done and a test where they put a scope down your nose. Well, I received NO results from these tests. ... [Pugh went home to Alabama after her release; she had served 18 months for drug possession.] On January 20 at the Southern University of Alabama Medical Center there was a test done. ... On January 24 I was admitted. ... A bacteria was found growing in my lungs ... and a mass was found on my top right lobe. They done a biopsy today, January 31, 2000. This is just a few things I have to say and proof that it's true.
On March 27, 2000, two months after I received this letter, Janice Pugh died of metastasized cancer in a Mobile, Ala., hospice. She was 52 years old. She had served her sentence at FMC (Federal Medical Center) Carswell, near Fort Worth, Texas, because of her medical needs, yet her symptoms went undiagnosed and untreated there.
"We were told by the oncologist who treated Mama [in Alabama] that she was 'very neglected' at Carswell," said her daughter, Tracy Ingram.
I wish I could write that Janice Pugh's case is an aberration. It is not. For almost a decade, I have been writing about the Janice Pughs of FMC Carswell -- women as old as 80 and as young as 18, from all races and all classes, who have needlessly suffered or died from what a former Carswell doctor described as "medical mistakes, substandard care and unconscionable delays" in treatment.
Behind the nation's razor-wire fences, egregious medical neglect has been the norm for decades. But for the most part, this dark side of prison life is ignored by the mainstream media and lawmakers, and too often accepted by the general population as just another price paid by those committing crimes. The Carswell women's debt to society, however, shouldn't have included their lives.
more@linkWomen inmates die and suffer from medical neglect in a prison system that is much more... more
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