by Charles Reece, San Quentin State Prison, CA
April 21st, 2020 at 9am I was transported to Marin General Hospital for my long overdue prostate surgery that I had been waiting on for twenty-two months. I should have been given the surgery no later than one month after discovery of the prostate cancer in June of 2018.
A prisoner is never transported to outside medical facilities more than thirty minutes before their appointment for security reasons, therefore my surgery should have taken place no later than 10am but didn’t.
The two guards and I arrived at the hospital five minutes after leaving San Quentin prison and waited in the waiting room until 1pm until a nurse came and got us and wheeled me into the surgery waiting room in a wheel chair. I remained in that waiting room for an hour while the nurses did their thing in getting me ready for surgery. Four other patients was also waiting and being prepped for surgery.
After arriving in the prep waiting room a nurse said, “He’s scheduled for surgery at 1:30pm.”
Then other nurses began their work on me asking me a hell of lot questions then one nurse said “His surgery is schedules to last three hours. The last to see me was the anesthesiologist who told me what he was going to be doing then he asked me If I had any question to which I replied no. I just wanted to get it over with.
Just when I thought he was ready to go another nurse came in and said, “The surgery is being cleaned so it will be another thirty minutes.”
2:30pm. I was taken to the “OR” followed by the anesthesiologist and the prep nurse an Asian Beauty. Once inside the anesthesiologist said, “I’m putting the oxygen mask on and starting the TV, then I began to wake up.
I had no sensation of passage of time just slowly opening my eyes and that was taking far too long and too much effort. My brain was’t working properly. I couldn’t keep my eyes open and I couldn’t talk. I didn’t realized until hours later that I kept passing out. Finally at 7:45pm a nurse called my name, “Charles are you alright?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me how long you were out?”
“About three hours.”
The answer was more like five hours but my brain wasn’t working properly and from 7:45pm until 10pm. I was in and out of consciousness and couldn’t complete a sentence if my life depended on it.
I heard a nurse say, “He should have been out of it long before now.”
The nurse was right. I had been knocked out three times before and each time I was back to normal within 45 minutes talking my head off, not this time. That night I could hardly say word and my speech was slurred, my motions were suspect and I was moving in slow motion going nowhere fast.
I was hooked up to an IV drip bad with a catheter up my penis with a five foot long plastic tube running down to a urine bag at the foot of the bed. The nurses checked on me every hour and to drain the urine bag. I notice that my stomach was bloated as if filled with air which it was.
A nurse saw me looking at my stomach and said, “The surgeon filled you up with air, it will go away soon.”
The surgeon told me he was putting five holes into my abdomen, but he put six. I don’t know what the sixth was for. Four of the six holes were very small, one was about an inch long and one was two inches long and all of them screwed up my abdomen.
I found out the hard painful way not to laugh at anything. As soon as I came out from under the anesthesia, one of the two guards guarding me said, something funny so I half laughed at it and my abdomen came to life with pain I had never felt before and didn’t want to ever feel again. It really, really hurt like hell.
“What the hell? What happened to the pain killer?” I asked myself, then I discovered I couldn’t cough either.
“Damn, I’m screwed up. I can’t use my abdomen muscles at all,” I thought to myself.
About an hour after coming from under the anesthesia I began to sweat badly so when the nurse came in to check on me I told her about the sweating so she removed two blankets. Hell I hadn’t noticed I was covered with four blankets until that moment in fact I was covered with six cotton blankets.
5AM I thought I had to take a dump, so I told one of my nurses who had warned me not to try to get out of bed by myself without her help. I had already figured that out. I had the catheter up my penis with that five foot long urine bag attached to my leg, 2. I was hooked up to an IV in my right arm. 3. If I tried to get out of bed without help I would fall flat on my face which wouldn’t be good.
Two nursers helps me into the bathroom and believe me I needed their help. I couldn’t believe how helpless I was and I didn’t like being helpless. One nurse carried the IV, the other carried the Urine bag and both carried me. I was very little help. (To Be Continued…)