Jail Nurse

Jail Nurse

2009-ish

I had been thrown in jail for something minor. I don’t remember what, but I was drinking heavily at the time, which is why I was put in the drunk tank. It was a large cell with a concrete floor and cinderblock walls painted yellow. There was nothing else in the room except a water fountain and one of those stainless-steel toilet/sink combo units they have at jails everywhere. You know, where the sink is built into the top of the toilet tank? I suppose there was also the stench: the stale malt-liquor/greasy-cheeseburger stench of unwashed drunks. Everyone got a mattress and nothing else. Mine went on the floor, and I plopped on top of it. They would put maybe ten or fifteen men in the tank, and we were all sick, miserable, and angry. There was no TV, no books to read, no blanket to keep warm, and no peace. That was the system. Jail is a horrible and dangerous place for the most part. Let me tell you why.

To avoid the inconvenience of even largely marginalized human beings dying in their misery factory, this jail employed a nurse. The common practice of the jail guards was to pull everyone out one by one and take us to an exam room down the hall, where the nurse would take our vitals. Then, if it were deemed absolutely necessary, she would give us a tiny amount of Valium or Librium. Just enough to prevent a seizure, but not enough to make us comfortable. God forbid we derelicts be made comfortable.

Over the years, knowing the torture I would be facing, I had learned a cool trick. I knew how to flex my abdominal muscles, constrict my core, and get my blood pressure to rise. The higher the blood pressure, the more likely it was that I would get a tiny dose of the medication that prevented seizures. I can tell you from personal experience that alcohol withdrawal can cause seizures. For anyone drying out in the drunk tank for a few days, this trick would come in handy… or so I thought.

On this particular day, when I was brought into the exam room, the nurse looked at me like I was a fingernail clipping she had just found in her salad. In her face was pure, uncut contempt. She was older than I, maybe in her late forties, and she was bony, with a narrow face and thin, limp brown hair. She looked like she belonged in a lawn chair in front of a trailer home, chain-smoking and blaring profanity at a collection of grubby, slack-jawed toddlers… her fatherless grandkids, no doubt.  

This was far from the first time I had been in this jail, so she had a clipboard of my medical history and sneered as she whipped through the pages. Then she glared at me and said, “Not gonna live to see thirty if ya’s plannin’ on keepin’ this shit up.”

I knew she’d been enjoying saying shit like this to pitiful bastards like me for years. I was sick and exhausted, but I couldn’t suppress a mirthless little chuckle.

“Aw, yah think that shit is funny?” she said, with a look like she had just smelled a fart.

“No, no. Not really,” I told her. “I’m not trying to minimize. It’s just that I’m thirty-four, so… that’s all.”

The King County Jail was built in downtown Seattle in the mid-1980s, right next to the concrete colossus of I-5. At any given time, the jail was packed with almost 2,000 inmates. The exam room was just another cell in the twelve-story cement monolith, but it was much smaller than the drunk tank and quieter. It featured an exam table, and the cinder block walls were painted pale blue.  

I sat down on the exam table, and the nurse strapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm and yanked it tight. It didn’t hurt, but as high as my anxiety was, I reflexively jerked away from her, which almost sent her sprawling.  

“Cud ya stay STILL!?!” she shrilled into my ear, while yanking on the cuff, ensuring that I couldn’t stay still. My head felt like a fine wine with elegant notes of aneurism, subtle tones of brain tumor, and a buttery finish of concussion, so her screaming in my ear lit my fuse. I could sense things starting to go sideways, all pear-shaped. I didn’t like where this was heading.

This small woman and I were in a fortified cell together but alone. The door was closed and locked, and the guards were on the other side. A small square of inch-thick plexiglass was embedded in the door, but nobody was looking through it.

I’m pretty sure someone was supposed to be watching.

It occurred to me that she was used to dealing with sad old drunks, too broken to fight back, but as she had so astutely observed, I was still reasonably young. I was so broken that I just might fight back… verbally, of course. I would never hit a woman, not even a rancid drone like the nurse, but she didn’t know that. 

She was being presumptuous.

She started taking my blood pressure, and I flexed my abs and tightened my core, still breathing normally. The BP reading was going up and up. No nurse had ever figured out that I was doing this on purpose, or if they had, they hadn’t let on, but she figured it out pretty damn quick. Not everyone can perform this trick, but there are various ways it can be done. Women usually do it by crossing their legs and squeezing their thighs together, which is more obvious than the way I do it.

This miserable nurse had clearly been dealing with scumbags like me long enough to be hip to the trick. She was furious. She wound up, reached back like a pimp, and slapped me on the bare shoulder about as hard as she could. “RELAX!” she shrilled, less than a foot from my head.

I could feel the warmth of her breath… in my fucking ear-hole.

I was off that exam table so fast that I surprised us both. I was in no condition to be that quick or that aggressive. Now, I was standing over her, leaning forward, looking down into her bitter face. Her little possum eyes betrayed no emotion, but her body language told me she was frozen in fear.

I said, “You do not hit me,” firmly but quietly, mindful of the guards somewhere on the other side of the door. 

She cut her eyes to the small window in the door and then back at me. Nobody was looking into the room.

The moment stretched on and on. We were both still. I was thinking, “ I could be screwed here. If she screams, the guards will beat me savagely, and I will be charged with some invented crime even though I haven’t touched her. And if she bursts into tears, I will feel bad.” I was already starting to feel bad. My mother would not have approved of this little song-and-dance. 

The nurse neither screamed nor cried. She was a nurse at the King County Jail. If she hadn’t been a hard, cold soul, she never would’ve lasted a week at that hideous job. She was doing hard time, just as much as any inmate. No wonder she was so miserable. She spoke to me curtly, breaking eye contact. “I apologize. Please sit down.”

As a peace offering, she got a tiny paper cup, and put the smallest possible dose of Librium or Valium in it, without ever turning her back on me. She handed it to me, along with another tiny paper cup full of water. As I swallowed the pill, she moonwalked backward, never taking her eyes off me, and slapped her slappin’ hand on the door a few times. The guards clanked the lock, swung the heavy steel door open, and walked me back to the drunk tank.

 As they were delivering me into the tank, they were pulling out the huge Samoan homeless guy who was on the mattress next to mine. He was next in line to see the nurse. Good. Dude was sick and getting sicker. He’d been sitting like the Buddha when I had originally been put in the tank, but he had folded over and started moaning after a few hours. 

“You doin’ ok there, Uce?” I had asked him. “Wanna get some water?” I had said as I was brought back from the nurse, and he was being brought out.

He just shook his head and rocked back and forth. Nothing I could do for him. I wasn’t much better off. I was shakin’ my shakers and crackin’ my crackers, and if someone had waved a piece of fried chicken under my nose, I would have projectile vomited. I was also hanging by a thin thread, filled with apprehension. The tiny morsel of medication I had miraculously obtained hadn’t kicked in yet, so I was asking myself the obvious question: would it be enough? 

I was starting to torture myself about the way I had handled the situation with the nurse. By this point in my life, I should have known better than to tiptoe right up to the crumbling edge of a spectacularly stupid situation, but I could still feel the sting of her handprint framing the tattoo on my left shoulder.

The Samoan guy was brought back ten minutes later, and he sat down on his mattress sideways, facing me. He looked at me, started seizing, and sunk his teeth deep into his tongue.

I can still picture the wild expression on his face and the blood spilling over his vibrating beard. He was gone, man, gone. He was looking at me but seeing nothing. Convulsing, his tongue trapped in his jaws. He appeared to have been struck by lightning. I imagined that I could hear sizzling and smell his hair smoldering. His mattress made no attempt to contain him, and his head started to make a hollow sound as it rhythmically whammed on the slab floor. In fact, nobody, including me, made any attempt to contain him. He was just too fucking big and strong, a giant slab of spasmodic muscle. It would have been like trying to ride a bucking bronco or a raging bull. I am many things, but rodeo clown isn’t one of them.

I felt just as powerless as the jail nurse must have felt when I hopped up off the exam table. I marveled at the possibility that she might not have given Uce any meds. I wondered if it was my fault for having antagonized her. Maybe the blood pressure cuff hadn’t even fit around his fucking arm. Of course, it hadn’t, but… naw, man. He had been such a mess that not even she could’ve been so cruel. He had gotten the same thing I had. The smallest possible dose. Too little and too late for him.

I guess the smallest possible dose of Librium or Valium isn’t enough for a 320-pound person in acute alcohol withdrawal.

Who could have known?

The jail nurse. That’s who could’ve known and should’ve known. She just didn’t know it yet.