This is a text drawn from my first book, Live from Death Row,”Manny’s Attempted Murder.” “At first glance, the guy looks like a black fire plug, short, coffee black, with a clean shaven, glistening dome. Manny resembles a mini version of boxing great Jack Johnson. An ex boxer of champion status himself, Manny moves with well muscled agility, at once at home in a ring or out. Bigger prisoners regard him with a wary respect. Lately though, his moves have been a little less than agile, a trifle forced. Manny’s recent history seems plucked from the pages of a Robert Ludlum mystery, but it is no tale. It is chillingly true.
A lifelong epileptic, his life has revolved around the daily ingestion of the anti-convulsant, Dilantin, with a sedative phenobarbital. Nonetheless, the last 10 years or so had him virtually seizure free, until coming to the hills of Huntington, and under the care of its medical staff. After an apparent setup and serious altercation with a white inmate, resulting in his assailant’s hospitalization, Manny was sent to the DC, or disciplinary custody max unit, a walled prison within a prison. There, the mystery. There, the attempted murder. No attack on a handcuffed inmate, the joint’s usual MO. No, tools change with the times, it seems. While in the max, Manny experienced a series of seizures powerful enough to leave him locked in a deep coma. ‘What the f is going on?’ he asked himself.
He paid extra close attention to his food. He waited. He watched. He fasted. Still, the seizures came in waves of increasing frequency and mind numbing power. ‘Why?’ He wondered. ‘Why now?’ He noticed new medications being administered; new colors, new quantities, and asked questions. ‘What’s this?’ The answers provided by the same persons who gave the medication, the guards, were easy, breezy, and lies. ‘Ah, nothin, a new kind of Dilantin,’ the nurse says. ‘You want your medication?’ The more he took, the worse he got. The more powerful the seizures. The deeper the comas. So, he stopped. He filed complaints. He demanded, and got, outside medical care. At Altoona’s hospital, Manny got his answers.
In addition to his Dilantin/phenobarbital regime, someone had slipped him the drugs Bloxcitane [Loxitane], Artane, and Haldol, known by its chemical name, haloperidol. The mixture was like a chemical cannonball, wreaking havoc on his vision, his balance, and, most ominously, his liver. When an internist began to conduct a micro biopsy on his liver and then halted, refused to go further, and sewed him back up, Manny’s instincts took over. Something was very wrong. The surgeon at Altoona told him there was a glass-like sheath over his liver. An ultrasound showed that it was swollen, distended. The Haldol, according to the authoritative Physician’s Desk Reference, was contraindicated to use with anti-convulsants like Dilantin, as it lowers the convulsive threshold. In a nutshell, it causes seizures.
In dizzying internal pain, Manny continued his battles against the prison medical bureaucracy that brought him from championship form to the brink of death. That he lives is itself a miracle. That he fights is by power of will. That the culprits, those who prescribe this toxic chemical cocktail, still go unnamed, is an indictment against a racist system of corruption masquerading as corrections. Meanwhile, he waits, he fights, he strengthens himself.” From Imprisoned Nation, this is Mumia Abu Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
