Patient, Not Prisoner
The struggle for healthcare behind bars
By Michael Broadway
After nearly four hours in surgery, I burrowed my way back to consciousness, only to find one of my arms and a leg shackled to the hospital bed.
Two correctional officers stood watch over me. The weight of those restraints wore more heavily on my mind than they did on my body; they were reminders that my body remained in a carceral state and needed to be secured despite being incapacitated after undergoing delicate surgery.
Feeling dehumanized in that moment was the least of my concerns. Were the doctors able to successfully remove my prostate? Did the cancer metastasize? Those were my chief fears.
Unfortunately, before I was able to fully regain consciousness and get answers from the doctors who performed the surgery, a nurse informed the officers that I was being released.
With my mind still in a fog, I was dressed back into my prison blues, shackled and handcuffed. I was helped into a wheelchair and led out of the room into darkness. Would I live?
In 2018, I first started experiencing discomfort in my prostate area.
As a Black man, it’s always been hard for me to trust healthcare officials. The U.S. Public Health Service Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee— known as the “Tuskegee Experiments”—began in 1932 and involved 600 Black men, none of whom provided their consent.
By 1943, penicillin became more widely available for the treatment of syphilis, but the subjects of the study, 399 of whom had syphilis, were not offered treatment. The study was published in 1972 and quickly ridiculed by the scientific community for being “ethically unjustified”—four decades after the study began.
It’s hard to fathom the unconscionable treatment those Black men had to endure; as a result, I have always felt unsafe in healthcare spaces. I don’t believe that they have my best interest at heart. But I felt enough discomfort that I shook off those fears and signed up for a sick call to see the doctor.
I remember being nervous before walking into a room at Stateville Correctional Center no bigger than my prison cell to talk with a nurse practitioner. The room was cramped: a small desk, which the nurse practitioner occupied, and a file cabinet on one side, a miniature exam table, and a plastic seat on the other side. I sat in the plastic seat with my hands stuffed in my pockets, staring at a spider as it spun its web high up in the corner of the office above the nurse’s desk. I said nothing.
After about five minutes, the nurse turned her chair towards me and asked several questions.
How old are you?
“46,” I replied.
Have you ever had a prostate exam before?
“No,” I said.
Would you like to have one today?
“Yes!” I exclaimed. This is what I had been seeking.
She stood, opened the file cabinet, and grabbed a blue and white Chuck and other medical supplies. I watched her meticulously lay out those supplies and place them on the exam table beside me. Fear was starting to take over after I recognized the tube of KY Jelly, but I knew I had to go through with this exam. I had to know why I was experiencing discomfort in my prostate area.
The nurse put on some blue rubber gloves and asked me to stand up, drop my pants and boxers to my ankles, and lean over the exam table. I paused and looked at her and then over to the open door, where other individuals in custody were waiting to be seen by her. An officer stood guard. Sensing my apprehension, the nurse said, “Security over privacy.”
She smiled at me.
I didn’t find it funny. Where was my privacy? Where was her professionalism? Again, I contemplated not going through with it, but before I could say I was cool on the whole thing, the nurse said she could have another nurse stand guard at the door if that would help. I said it would, but it didn’t.
After going through the invasive procedure and feeling violated by it, I promised that I wouldn’t do it again, especially after I was given the good news that all was okay. Hearing my prostate was not enlarged gave me relief.
However, I continued to feel extreme discomfort and signed up for exams again and again.
Each time, I received the same answer: that my prostate was not enlarged and that I should consider taking it easy playing with myself. It was an ill-advised attempt at being funny that I did not like. From 2018 to 2022, I had four or five embarrassing digital exams and each time I was met with unprofessionalism or a lack of privacy or seriousness about my healthcare concerns.
It wasn’t until February 2022 that I’d finally convinced a nurse coming through the cell house that I had grave concerns about my prostate: I wanted to have a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test run, which would tell me whether I had cause for concern. She advised me to say that prostate cancer ran in my family.
On a Tuesday afternoon, they drew my blood. On Friday, I was rushed to the healthcare unit, where a doctor wanted to see me. My PSA level was 8.56. A normal PSA level is between 0 and 0.5.
After my positive diagnosis of prostate cancer, I was scheduled to see an oncologist—in December. So, for ten months, I knew nothing besides the fact that I had cancer. Questions to the nursing staff either went unanswered, or I was told to save all my questions for when I went to the University of Illinois-Chicago hospital.
During this time, I relied on family and friends to do Google searches for me to learn about prostate cancer and what I could expect to happen. In December, I had a biopsy. In January 2023, I received those results: I had an aggressive form of prostate cancer that they feared could be spreading. In February, I had an ultrasound. The good news was that the cancer hadn’t spread; I was advised to have my prostate removed as quickly as possible. In March, I had the surgery. When I woke up, I was ushered out of the hospital.
When I returned to Stateville, the doctors and nursing staff didn’t know anything about recovery times or expectations concerning rehabilitation. As fate would have it, I suffered a setback. I walked to the school building two days following my surgery, and my testicles had swollen to the point where it was hard to walk. The act landed me in a wheelchair for over a month.
For two months, I languished, not knowing if my surgery was a success. It was mental torture. In May, the doctors gave me the good news: my surgery had been successful, and there were no signs of the cancer in the lymph nodes immediately attached to my prostate, a sign that the cancer hadn’t spread. All of this was good news to me then — but it could have been too little or too late.
For five years, I went through waves of mental anguish because of a lack of care and direction from the healthcare staff at nearly every step along the way. Why? Because I was incarcerated.
My journey revealed a harsh reality: incarceration often strips individuals of their right to humane healthcare. I had to endure unnecessary suffering and mental anguish despite being a patient in need of care.
Healthcare should be a fundamental right that extends to everyone, irrespective of prison walls, skin color, or ability to pay.
We are all human— treat us with humanity.
