# An Email Trail as the Day Is Long > My fiancé has stage IV cancer and blood clots, yet prison staff watched him swallow his pills and then accused him of selling them. When we spoke up, retaliation followed—false reports, denied medication, and cut communication. **Published**: 2026-10-09 **Source**: https://gps.press/an-email-trail-as-the-day-is-long/ **Author**: runtellthat --- Author: runtellthat I have an email trail as the day is long. To the commissioner. To the Ombudsman. To the regional director. To the statewide medical director, back when there was one. To the DOJ, Office of Civil Rights. To our state's U.S. Senator. To the Southern Center for Human Rights. I write it down and I send it out, because my fiancé is locked up and somebody on the outside has to say his name out loud. And here's the part I can't get over. They watch him take his pills. In a medical area, they watch him swallow, then they examine his mouth to make sure it went down. Whole pills. Every dose, in front of them, mouth open. They know what goes into him. And the doctor still stood up and said my fiancé cut those pills perfectly, to 7.5 milligrams, and sold them to somebody. Cut whole pills — perfectly — and sold them. When he never had anything but whole pills, and they watched him swallow every single one. That doctor threatened to take him off his medication. Then she went through with it. Then she tried to get him to sign a document saying he was refusing it. That's how it works out there. First the threat, then the punishment, then the paper that makes it look like his own choice. He has stage IV cancer. He suffers from blood clots. He needs that medication. Denying it didn't just frighten him — it injured him. It led to an injury, the way the denial of care has led to injuries before. Let me back up, because you can't understand the fight if you don't know who he is. He's the love of my life. My fiancé. He served more than 35 years before he was released, and he's been incarcerated again now for the last four years. I met him while he was out, on the other side of that first long stretch. We started as friends and we grew from there. Nobody plans for a love like that to end up behind a wall twice, but that's where we are. Those years in between, we were living life. We were working on getting our lives in order, the way anybody does — trying to build something steady. And he's a person with disabilities. People look at him and decide he isn't smart, that he won't know how to speak up for himself. But he does. He knows exactly how to speak up. I think that's part of what brought this down on him. Because we spoke up. His grievances and my grievances are hitting hard. Mine and his both. That's when the retaliation started. Staff got upset, and they created false disciplinary reports on him. There was camera footage that showed he was being falsely accused — and the officer in charge went through with accepting the false documentation anyway. They never pulled the footage. That's the thing that tells you what you're dealing with. The truth was sitting on a camera, and nobody wanted to look at it. I reported the doctor who threatened him and then went through with the threat of withholding his medication. I sent a tip to the FBI. It got her and a cohort arrested. And still — there's now an injury, and they are trying to delay a medical need. At the same time, they're cutting our communication with each other, because his grievances and my grievances are hitting hard. The fight I'm in doesn't stay at the prison level, it comes back on the one thing we have left, which is hearing each other's voices. I don't know how to say this part without sounding like I'm drowning, because some days I am. The fighting is the whole day. The emails, the agencies, the records, the names and the dates. I keep meticulous records, because if I don't, it's just my word against theirs — and my word doesn't count for much from the outside. What I keep coming back to is the deliberate indifference. That's what I'm exposing at the prison level — the deliberate indifference to medical needs. It isn't a mistake. Mistakes get corrected. This is a person with cancer and blood clots being taken off his medication, accused of a scheme that couldn't have happened, and then pressured to sign his own refusal so it looks like his idea. Meanwhile the report that should exonerate him sits on footage no one will pull. People don't expect much from him because of his disabilities. They never did. But he speaks up, and I speak up, and that is exactly the problem for them. I need to take a break.