On the morning of January 30, a 43-year-old inmate went to the infirmary at Dixon Correctional Center complaining of chest pain. When he returned to his housing unit, he told the other prisoners he’d been treated with Tylenol and Tums. That evening, he collapsed in the doorway of his cell.
Holland, then 43, was diagnosed with esophageal varices, dilated blood vessels that can occur when the scar tissue of a damaged liver disrupts the flow of blood, which then backs up in the vein connecting the liver to the other abdominal organs. The blood redirects itself out through tiny vessels in the wall of the esophagus, and those vessels can stretch beyond their capacity and burst, resulting in a massive hemorrhage. Sometimes the bleeding stops on its own or with medical intervention, but at least 30 percent of the time bleeding varices are fatal.
But the day he was discharged, IDOC transferred him to Danville Correctional Center, almost 200 miles away. He never saw Castro again.
Hepatitis C is a leading cause of liver failure and liver cancer and is the primary reason for most liver transplants. Anything with blood on it is a potential source of transmission. You can get the disease by sharing a toothbrush or razor blade with someone who’s infected, by getting tattooed, or by injecting drugs with a dirty needle–the most common way. You’re also at risk if you have sex with an infected partner, though the risk is lower than with direct blood-to-blood transmission. About 85 percent of people who contract HCV become chronically infected; 20 percent of them eventually develop cirrhosis. Cirrhosis caused by the virus kills between 8,000 and 10,000 people in the U.S. each year.
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Holland is six feet tall and thin, with heavily tattooed arms. He was born in Kentucky in 1957 to a teenage mother and a father who was in the military. His parents divorced when he was a baby, and he and his mother soon relocated to Illinois, where she eventually remarried.
Holland ran away to escape beatings, but, he says, it was the 60s, “so they just kept sending me back.”
He met his girlfriend, who doesn’t want her name used, 13 years into his sentence. She read through his criminal file shortly after they met and had a hard time reconciling the person she knew with the description she found on paper. “The person I met was nothing like what was described,” she says. “He was a different person already.”
