After fighting long and hard to get her diabetes medication in jail, Janelle felt herself slipping away. She begged, pleaded, screamed, and threatened for her medication, only to be told they were working on it.
But not before she could slip into a coma. She awoke with a start a few days later in the hospital to the harsh and aggressive sounds of a nurse slamming and banging around in the cubicle she was in.
“W-what's going on?” asked a confused Janelle.
The middle-aged, average-looking black nurse said nothing at first.
“What happened? Am I in the hospital?” Janelle asked with a shrill in her voice.
“Relax!” the nurse finally snapped. “You went into a diabetic coma. You're in the jail infirmary.”
Janelle took a moment to digest this information as the nurse continued to roughly go about her business, doing whatever she was doing with the equipment around her.
“Why are you so angry?” Janelle asked. The nurse left without answering.
Janelle quickly recovered and was accosted by the media as she was being walked back to her cell. Rapid questions were fired off at her, most of which were asking if she was going to press charges for not getting her medication in time.
“Naw,” Janelle said. “People make mistakes, and as they said, they’re a jail. Not a hospital.”
“You don't think this was done deliberately?” a woman asked Janelle.
Janelle appeared startled by the question and glanced at the officer escorting her, then back at the media. “I sure hope not, but no, I don't see why anyone would risk getting hit with a lawsuit and probably some jail time of their own.”
The guard escorting her snorted and pushed Janelle ahead.
Not long afterward, Janelle was brought into the captain’s office. Fearing additional charges were going to be added to her sentence for God knew what, knowing how much the system seemed to love to pick on her, she was both surprised and relieved when all the captain wanted to do was defend his officers and be assured that Janelle wouldn't say negative things about them.
Janelle chuckled. “Seriously? That’s what this is about?”
“Well, we just want to make sure we understand where each other’s coming from,” said the captain carefully.
“No problem. The thought of anyone deliberately harming me never crossed my mind. I never would have thought of it if it wasn't for the media and now you bringing it up.”
The captain seemed relieved to hear this, but now Janelle's curiosity was piqued.
“Can I ask a question, though?”
The captain nodded his consent.
“If no one's done anything wrong, then why are you so worried? Why would you care who says what if no one has anything to hide?”
“Well,” the captain said with a slight smile of sarcasm, “because we still wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea. If you didn't do something, would you want people to think you were guilty?”
“Well, I'm not in the habit of caring what others think, especially if I'm not guilty, but that's just me. I understand that most people are more paranoid about that sort of thing.”
“It's not so much that they’re paranoid,” the captain said a little more tersely. “I just don't want to see fingers pointed in the wrong direction.”
“Okay. No problem. You have nothing to worry about from me. Again, I never thought anyone did this to me intentionally, and if they did, I better never find out about it.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No, sir. That's a true statement. I just want the medication I need when I need it. But again, I never suspected anyone was trying to kill me. I'd like to think no one hates me that much.”
The others gave a brief chuckle, neither of which was done with genuine amusement, and then Janelle was once again escorted back to her cell where others shouted questions to her from their own cells, convinced that it was done deliberately so they wouldn't have to deal with her.
When the officers got tired of listening to these suspicions being voiced over and over, they hushed everyone up and assured them that none of the officers wanted anyone to get the blessing of being able to sleep through their sentence.
Yet between the media’s questions, the captain's defensiveness, and now this officer’s statement, Janelle did begin to wonder what the truth was. Could someone have deliberately withheld her medication? Stranger things had happened, but if anyone had tried to kill her or at least put her out of commission for a while to make their jobs easier, she had no way of proving it.
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