My fiancé Bill has been at Gus Harrison for 2 years. During the entire time we have been fighting to get adequate medical care for him so that he might survive long enough to be able to come home.
His whole story is one where things were just not handled appropriately. As a young man, even going back to his childhood he was thrown in with the wrong people because of his mother and her brother’s affiliation with gangs in California.
However he was able to escape that life over 30 years ago and has lead a normal non-criminal life during those 30 years. But his early days caught up with his health and he became disabled as an amputee. He always tried to help out young men who were in similar lifestyle to what he had known.
One of these young men, Matt, moved into our house and was doing some odd jobs for us. One weekend Bill and Matt got into a drinking binge and Matt got out of hand and was fighting with everyone including his girlfriend who he was calling the worst names like c…t. Bill got angry with him and told him to stop.
He started to come after Bill and Bill perceived it as life threatening since Matt had studied martial arts and Bill was in a wheelchair. But unfortunately they had been fooling around with the guns earlier and Bill’s pistol was loaded at his side. He warned Matt to stay away and when he kept advancing Bill shot him.
That pretty much sobered both of them up, but still not thinking correctly they made up a story before Bill took him to the hospital. Well to make a long story short Bill was convicted of using a gun to cause great bodily harm.
The recommended time was 5-20 but the judge decided that things from 30 years ago showed a pattern and raised it to 7.5-20. In county jail they took care of all of his medical but as soon as he hit MDOC they took away all the medicines and treatments that he was getting for his multiple medical conditions.
They even let his defibrillator almost die until I complained to Lansing and all my congressman etc that if they didn’t get him in to change the batteries that he would die. The defibrillator runs his heart as it is a pacer/ defibrillator also known as an ICD.
In addition to amputation, heart and lung problems, diabetes, chronic degenerative back disease, he also has severe depression and anxiety. So he gets really scared when he knows that his medical treatment is not right.
So since COVID started he has been a nervous wreck because he knows it could kill him. Especially the blood clotting problems that occur. On the outside he failed on Coumadin blood thinner at least twice and then once in county jail. They cannot regulate it so he is always in danger of bleeding excessively or clotting when they use it. They found at his cardiologist that he did well on Pradaxa. MDOC will not prescribe it because it costs more. So they keep him on Coumadin and do the blood tests which bounce all over showing that he is always either in danger of bleeding or clotting. He is almost never in the right range. So we are constantly scared .
Then you add the pandemic and it makes it worse. The staff are so rude when he asks questions or for anything medical. They usually call him names and tell him to go back to his hole. I retire in 18 months and I intend to spend my time until he returns home writing a book about our experience with MDOC. So I will watch for others stories. It all makes me so sad. The picture is Bill and our daughter Tanya.