Friday the 5th of March, 2010. My ninth day in jail, my 53rd birthday.

[custom_script adID=149]

I told no one, made no calls. I gave myself a present. Julio had inadvertently sent me some of my art stickers in my backpack. I pasted one of them on my locker door, a design I made in 1993 of two trout fish swimming in a double helix pattern in front of a Yin Yang, a Pisces sticker.

The second Saturday came and went with no visit, still had no phone numbers except Julio’s, my lawyer’s and Maria’s. I wasn’t calling Maria yet because I didn’t want to worry her at least until I knew better what was going on. My lawyer wouldn’t answer either collect calls or calls directly on the telephone card, presumably because they did not take calls from the jail.

I had been doing OK with the emergency Salbutamol inhaler that I got from the jail clinic on my first day, but Julio had not sent me my other inhaler, Beclometasona the maintenance medicine. The jail had not provided that either and my asthma was beginning to make itself more and more obnoxious as the days went by.

The bunk where I stayed was in the main social area of Módulo C, where at night after lights out a dozen or so men gathered to watch a movie on TV until 11. These were the heaviest smokers in the module, and the last two hours of my waking day were spent breathing in the tail ends of two or three dozen cigarettes.

I was diagnosed 7 years ago with emphysema, and I could really feel the effects of all that smoke. There were also some men with some kind of flu in the module who spent the nights hacking wild coughs into the dark. Obviously the sanitary conditions in here were not in anyone’s favor and germs were just as free as the wind in jail.

On Saturday afternoon the 6th of March my lungs were laboring and I was going over what I thought I should do. It was a difficult judgement call, made more difficult by the need to account for the skepticism of the guards and the clinic workers about my asthma condition

When I went to the clinic on my first full day in jail to get a new inhaler, they at first rejected my request because I “wasn’t having an emergency.” That was the point, preventing an emergency from happening was what I was trying to do. Anyway, I was left with the message that if I was to get any medical attention, I needed to be dying right there on the spot. My asthma might be telling me that I needed treatment, but I would have to wait until it was obvious to the whole world that I was having an attack before they’d help me.

I tried to just keep still and forget about it, but the smoke kept filling the room, and in fact, I was coming down with a pulmonary infection caught in the same polluted air of the restricted space of our cell. It was just a matter of time.

[custom_script adID=151]

After the movie, everyone settled into their bunks and the nightly concert began. The sounds of the rudest set of bodily eruptions I had ever encountered burst into the grimy night carried on the slight breeze that wafted through the module through the stark spokes of light from the street. I kept trying to relax and finally I slept. I awoke at about midnight, chest tightening into a spasm that I recognized as being on its way past the point of no return.

I calculated.

The hospital at San Rafael de Alajuela is about a 20 minute ride from La Reforma. I didn’t know what the guards would do in case of an emergency. Did they call an ambulance to come from the Cruz Roja or the hospital? In any case, I had to account for the time that it would take for the guards to call an ambulance and for it to arrive along with the time to get to the hospital. I figured that if I needed to have emergency attention, I should give at least 2 hours notice. I had to call for help before the actual emergency if I wanted to live through the emergency when it came.

At 12:30 I decided that it was now or never, that the chances of me lasting till 9:00 am were gone and that even though I could still sort of breathe OK right now, I better make the call for help.

I awoke my neighbor, Arcilla, and asked him if there was a key to the gate on the module, if he could go tell the guards downstairs that I was in an emergency and needed to go to the hospital. He got up and disappeared down the stairs into the pitch black of Módulo B.

I could see his silhouette at the bars of that module calling to the guards across the distance of Módulo D. The guards arrived and disappeared. I went to sit on the bench and wait, hunched over just maintaining even breaths and keeping still.

At about 2:00 am the guards came up the stairs to get me and took me outside to the front of the office where a large white penitentiary van was waiting with three armed guards. They put me in handcuffs and sat me down alone in the back of the armor plated paddy wagon. The cold white steel of the bench was scratched with rough graffiti, pictographs of 9 mm pistols, marijuana leaves, women’s names and men’s members. I arrived at the hospital at about 2:45 am, just about right on time.

The ride in the back of the cold van was bumpy and hard. It hadn’t helped relax the spasm that was tightening its grip on my lungs. By the time I got out and was led into emergency reception, standing in the lobby in handcuffs, the valoration nurse couldn’t hide her attitude of irritation but had to confirm that yes, I needed emergency treatment for asthma.

I was taken to the asthma ward and handcuffed to the treatment chair. I was injected with Beclometasona and given 5 Salbutamol treatments with the nebulizer mask. The two armed guards sat bored out of their minds next to me as we were joined by an elderly man, a woman with her young daughter. The middle of the night can be a busy time for an emergency asthma ward.

I had been through this before. I watched as the guards took it all in. They seemed to understand better when they saw the little girl and the elderly man, understand that asthma is real and not just some emotional fake out that losers pull to get sympathy.

[custom_script adID=150]

The doctor came and interviewed me at about 4:00 am as I was finishing the treatment. He asked about the conditions in the jail and I told him about the smoke. He told me that I should not stay there any longer and we just looked at each other. Right!

He wrote me a prescription. He was a Cuban and he spoke to me in English. I replied in español so that my guards would understand the discussion. He condemned the conditions in La Reforma on health grounds. How exactly did subjecting persons with chronic illnesses to aggravating conditions further the supposed aim of social rehabilitation or less, the well-being of the Costa Rican family?

The guards took me to wait in the lobby of the hospital near the pharmacy. It was now about 4:30 am on Sunday morning. This was only my second Sunday morning in jail, but I really missed going to Mass, the Church. In the lobby of the hospital at San Rafael, there is a small chapel area where stand statues of the Virgin Mary and Christ, as well as the Archangel Raphael. I asked the guards if they would let me pray there while we waited and they said sure.

I knelt down on my knees in front of the statues and closed my eyes to pray. I opened my eyes maybe half an hour later and the guards were looking at me anxiously, the prescriptions were ready. We waited another half an hour for the paddy wagon to come pick us up and I arrived back at the jail as the morning coffee was being delivered to the modules in its giant plastic thermoses, breathing well, tired as hell.

[custom_script adID=97]


Written by Terrence who is a 53 year old Gringo living in Costa Rica.

You can see the Discussion Forum about this here.

Or ….

Click On The Box Below To Tell Us How You Feel About This!


Are you into beautiful Costa Rica?

All interesting things you want to know about Costa Rica are right here in our newsletter! Enter your email and press "subscribe" button.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *