In June 2023, I woke up in intense pain. It felt like someone had jammed a wrench into my shoulder socket, clamped and twisted. This wasn’t the first time my shoulder felt this way.
Six years earlier, after a tough workout, I sensed slight discomfort — like someone was forcing their knuckle into my shoulder. As a result, I stopped working out for months. When I did start exercising again, I didn’t push myself as hard. Still, over the years, the discomfort turned into gripping pain.
Since the injury, I’d visited a doctor four times, in most cases being prescribed a benign painkiller and physical therapy. I’d been keeping up with the stretches and exercises, but on this particular morning, the pain was compounded by numbness from my bicep to the tips of my fingers. I regained feeling in my arm after a minute or so, but the wrenching pain persisted. I knew I needed help from a doctor, so I filled out a medical form.
Two days later I received a small strip of red paper in the mail that resembled a carnival ticket. It was a medical ducat, the prison’s official method of summoning a patient for a medical appointment.
Inside the medical department, a corrections officer sat behind a podium. I handed him my ducat and wedged between a small crowd of prisoners to find a seat on one of the concrete benches in the waiting area. After half an hour, a nurse strolled toward us.
“Kamack?” she called out. She held the medical form that I had filled out days ago.
She led me into a small room. Inside, there was an exam table, a chair for patients and a desk with a computer. I sat in the chair and faced her. She handed me a pen and a clipboard.
“Fill out this form, please.”
The form looked like something out of a child’s coloring book. In a neat row, from left to right, were ten circular faces. Each face had dots for eyes and a line for its mouth. On the far left, the face had a line that curled into a smile. To the right of it, the smile was not as curved. One by one, the faces gradually became sadder. The face farthest to the right had a squiggly line for a mouth, indicating a grumpy emotion.
At the top of the paper, the form instructed me to circle one of the faces to describe my level of pain. “Oh, brother,” I grumbled. It seemed medical staff figured a smiley face could articulate my pain more effectively than my own words.
I circled the face farthest to the right and handed the clipboard back to the nurse.
“It doesn’t look like your shoulder is bothering you,” she mumbled. Her eyes ran up and down my arm — the one I was using to write — as if she had X-ray vision and could detect my pain.
“Well, it is,” I said, wondering if her X-ray vision could see the curse words swirling in my mind.
About 15 minutes after the nurse left the room, a doctor walked in. He nodded toward me and sat at his computer.
“OK,” he said, “let me just check your medical history.” His fingers plucked the keyboard. After what felt like a minute, I filled him in.
“It’s my shoulder again,” I said. “Remember? This is probably my fifth time making a complaint.”
He stared at the computer screen.
Finally, he faced me and furrowed his eyebrows. “Well, we’ve given you naproxen 500-milligram tablets.” He said it as though he couldn’t comprehend how the pills had not magically repaired the tearing pain in my shoulder.
“The painkillers aren’t working,” I explained, then requested an MRI.
He sighed. “I see we’ve also sent you to a physical therapist. Have you been doing your stretches?” As he said this, he extended his arm toward the ceiling, like he was demonstrating the concept of stretching to a child.
“Yes, I’ve been doing my stretches,” I said patiently, even though I was becoming increasingly exasperated. “But there’s still pain.”
He turned from me and plucked at the keyboard again. “I’m going to order some tests,” he said. “Some blood work.”
I took a deep breath, sensing the blood in my veins rise to the crown of my head. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“It seems like you’re only interested in treating my problem after it gets severely bad. Why not do what it takes now to prevent it from getting worse later?”
He sat silently. Again, his eyebrows furrowed. Then, after a moment, he said with finality, “We tend to do more treatment.”
When I returned to my housing unit, I filed an official medical grievance called a 602, used to report malpractice. After two months, I received a response. The California Correctional Health Care Services ruled that my grievance did not meet the definition of staff misconduct.
Several months after my most recent visit with the doctor, I got the MRI I asked for. The results revealed a torn labrum, which I’d likely been suffering from for six years, according to the orthopedist who went over the results with me via a telemedicine video appointment. He recommended surgery. That was in January 2024.
As I write, the tissue in my shoulder is literally hanging off the bone.
To this day, I’ve yet to receive surgery to repair my shoulder. Soon, I’ll see that doctor again and inquire why it is taking so long to receive a surgery that was recommended over a year ago. Most likely, I’ll have to start the entire process again, starting with the smiley face form. This time, I don’t think there’s a face on the chart that’s capable of describing my emotion.