First days reflections:
I’m nervous as hell. We were told to not bring anything metal inside (containers, utensils), so I chugged my coffee in the car before I got there. This did not help calm my nerves. (Turns out they don’t care if you bring these metal object in, at least no one is checking).
I get there at o-dark early. It’s cold. And the officer at the gate to the parking lot doesn’t have me on a list to enter. So I retreat to park in the Visitors Parking lot and walk up the hill to meet her again. I wait outside, shivering…maybe the cold but mostly nerves. I provide her a print out of the person who is my contact, the person who handle the registry health care providers. She still doesn’t have authorization to allow me past the gates.
Not the welcoming you want on your first day working at a prison.
She calls the guard at the front entrance and he gives me the ok to walk past the gate to meet him there. I walk in the cold darkness to the front entrance and the officer has me step to the side and sign in on the visitors log. He still has no idea who is supposed to meet me. But he’s cordial and joking with me. Refreshing.
Others walk past me, flashing their card of entry. Until a woman shows up and he says, “you’re a PT, right?” She agrees and I am instantly grateful. She welcomes me and she is my ticket in. I just show my drivers license to a guard sitting up high. We enter in one set of iron gates until all those who are there have piled in. That gate closes and we flash ID cards again. The gate on the other side clicks open and we all exit. The last person slams the gate closed, ready for the next staff to enter. The door to exit is heavy and has a sign begging, “Please Keep Closed.” Otherwise the cold from outside enters in for the officer sitting above.
We walk across the entry area, a courtyard. Encased by chapels on one side and the Adjustment Center (solitary confinement) on the other. In front of us is the Hospital. A building built in the mid 1800’s but refurbished sometime 2016.
We walk past the officers desk where inmates check into their appointments and head back to the physical therapy office/gym.
The view is comforting, if that’s at all possible on this particular morning. I had thought we might be down in some basement. I call it a diamond in the rough. We have a view of a well know mountain and a sliver of bay water below. It’s lovely to have its presence there. And all the inmates will comment on the view.
Below this diamond, is the rough. The general population (GP) Yard. A birds eye view of all the ongoings of a day. The creative exercises (bench pressing the edge of a picnic table), pushups, pull-ups, dips, walking, jogging, basketball, tennis), fist bumps as connections are made, and those standing around solo. This will be forever where my eyes land when I have down time. A perfect people watching vantage point. And a connection of nature….present to the changing landscape beyond, and the seabirds that mingle there. Therapeutic for the inmates to have living things where that is otherwise very sparse.
I’m taking all of this in. And yet, my teeth are still chattering. The PT gym is like a meat locker. The officer that announces inmate patient arrivals, calls it such. This is not helping my nerves. I can barely talk when I’m spoken to, because my jaw is locked up from chattering.
It’s a whirlwind of a day–meeting my supervisor who is awash with tasks as I’m starting that day as well as a new Telehealth service the following day. He barely introduces himself. Not because he’s rude, but he has so much going on. We head right into trying to get me a key card and login access to the system there. Without these, it becomes a challenge to try to see patients. This will prove so as I begin the following day.
Otherwise, I spend the day shadowing my fellow PT and asking questions as she guides me through an on-the job kind of training of the ins and outs. What I do find that is reassuring is that she has worked here 4 years. And our other co-worker PT who comes in 2 days a week has been there 6 years. And neither of them have had a safety issue where medical staff was threatened or harmed. That is very refreshing.
Alas, I truly thought I’d be sitting in a room, learning the system, going through safety training and having a true orientation the first week. It was not that, at all.
I find out that the safety button we’re supposed to have and was told to buy a belt and holster (I made sure to to carry this said safety button, was not used by staff because it would go off when people bent down so it was considered a risk of false alarm. Think of the “I’ve fallen and can’t get up” button. I was told our whistle, which I was also told to get prior to coming, was our best bet. Blow the whistle, and someone would be there in an instant.
**Note on the whistle…..I searched online and found that the one that would be best is one without a ball in it. The one’s without the ball, never get stuck. So the more you blow, the more it grows louder. It will never peter out because the ball will never stick in the whole to block it.
I realize sometime about 10am that I haven’t eaten anything, nor had much to drink (I had been up since 4:30am). And thus hadn’t been to the bathroom. That’s how I knew I was just a bundle of nerves the whole day. And because I don’t have key access yet, I don’t have free access to go to the bathroom when I want. This continues for 2 more days, until I am able to get a temporary key card that at least gets me into the bathrooms.
It’s a day awash with learning so much about the workings of things, meeting new people that I won’t remember their names until next week. And wishing that we just had at least one day to be oriented to everything. But that is how it works, I guess, in a state prison. With so many systems in place for almost everything else, it seems orienting new employees, particularly registry, is not one of those protocol systems.
And I leave the day, exhausted, eyes, tired and excited to come back the next day.
*just to note, I’ll be leaving out the name of the institution that I work at. It’s a state prison for reference. Images are not from the prison as no devices are allowed in.
Prison PT 
Leave a comment