Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital Read Online Free PDF Page B

until the end of the day. I think of Dr. Faruz and turn to follow Beth back down the stairs to the ground floor.
    We wind our way through the back corridors and are stopped by a phalanx of corrections officers. There are the usual officers in bluewith holstered guns, but now there are also many in white shirts and the entire area is blocked off from every direction. We see a single prisoner being led between a squadron of blue and white shirts in front of us down the hall from the Blue Room to the CPEP entrance.
    He’s the prisoner I saw come in early this morning from my office window. He is shuffling in his leg shackles. He looks over at us since we are the only non-guards in his field of vision. He is totally expressionless. His eyes are alive, but he gives away nothing. His tattoos are obvious now, even more chilling since they cover every inch of exposed skin except the front of his face. His neck bears the letters
MS
and a number
13
.
    Las Maras Salvatrucha. The Maras are leagues away from the Crips and Bloods. They’re relatively new to New York. I am familiar with them from my trips to Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico near the Guatemalan border. The Maras prey upon undocumented immigrants fleeing north. They will steal and extort everything. They will cut off arms, disembowel, or behead someone for nothing. When the Maras are sent to prisons, they take them over, organize them, terrorize the guards, and train their fellow inmates in their particularly vicious brand of violence.
    CPEP, where the Mara gang member is taken, is a very controlled space. New York City police and hospital police stand right outside the doors and glass windows. The many staff members inside this prison wing are used to dealing with all kinds of difficult situations, particularly violent and unpredictable patients. “Tako”—as he is nicknamed according to his file—swallowed some silverware at the supermax prison on Rikers, and needs some X-rays and a surgical consult. We have to observe him for a couple of days while things work their way through his system and out the other end. This is a fairly common practice, and we call the patients “swallowers.” Inmates use this little trick as a way to get off the island and break up the boredom. Our Mara friend says nothing. I’m glad to get out of there and thank my colleague for taking me down with her, though I will have Maras
pesadillas
, nightmares, for a few weeks afterward.
    I head back to my office as my beeper goes off. Budd. I call up.Guerra isn’t eating. Won’t allow anything in the tube, either. His wife and son are beside themselves. I say I’ll be up.
    Late in the afternoon, the ritual of getting into 19 South is compounded by the rush for elevators, the waiting, pushing, shoving off all those in a hurry to go up or down. After I make it to the floor, Budd takes me to Guerra. He looks gray. If anything, he has aged since this morning. He looks up at me, weary, and looks down at his shoes again, bent over as he is with his shoulders on his knees. His wife and son look alarmed.
    “What’s up?” I ask him.
    “I’m sick, Doc.”
    “How come you’re not eating?”
    “I’m afraid to throw it up. It’ll hurt.”
    “You have to eat, Guerra, or you’re going to get weaker. You need all the strength you have for this. We will use the stomach tube now exclusively to feed you, so no worry about swallowing at all. You will reteach yourself how to swallow when you’re stronger. Your throat muscles will learn again.”
    He looks at me. “It doesn’t matter.”
    “Guerra, don’t give up now. You’ll be home soon. You have to save your strength for your treatment. Don’t make it harder for your wife or for your son.”
    Guerra looks up again, and stares at each of them.
    “Okay. Bring it on.” His wife attaches the syringe to the plastic outlet on the tube that dangles from just above his belly button—her first time feeding him, and pours in the Ensure. He