This video is from a 60 Minutes segment made in conjunction with the WP series on immigrants and medical neglect. Edwidge Danticat is being interviewed, a winner of the National Book Award, she wrote about her 81 year old grandfather who died while in detention.
See dreamacttexas post about Danticat "It just doesn't happen to Latinos" from March 24, 2008
In Custody, In Pain
Beset by Medical Problems as She Fights Deportation, A U.S. Resident Struggles to Get the Treatment She Needs
by Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest | Washington Post Staff Writers
Page A1; May 12, 2008
FLORENCE, Ariz. -- Underneath her baggy jail-issue pants, Yong Sun Harvill feels the soft lump just below her left knee. Sometimes it tingles. Sometimes it is numb. Like her cancer felt when it arrived behind the knee a few years ago.
She noticed the lump under the thin, blue cotton in August, five months after federal immigration officers, to her amazement, took her into custody to try to deport her for buying stolen jewelry more than a decade ago. The lump grows slowly. It is now three inches across. And though she keeps asking, no one has done a test to see whether her sarcoma has come back.
Her leg is painful and swollen from hip to foot, damaged by past surgeries and radiation treatments. Some nights, liquid seeps through cracks in her distended skin. Her left ankle is three times as big as her right. For years, she relied on a leg pump to boost her circulation and keep the swelling in check. But as an immigration detainee in this desert prison town, Harvill, 52, has been unable to persuade anyone to get her a pump, or to let her family back in Florida send hers from home.
Nor has she gotten the biopsy that a doctor has told her she needs to determine whether the spots on her liver might be tumors. And it remains uncertain whether her frequent crying spells are part of bipolar disorder, as some records suggest, or a flare-up of old anxieties -- heightened now by chronic pain, bewildering medical problems, and the fact that, three decades after she arrived from South Korea as a teenage Army bride, she is in a jail far from home with the government trying to eject her from the United States...
for complete WP article click here
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