Prison Was the Best Year of My Life: Part 1

     This is not a general rule nor should it be taken to mean prison is good or fun or cushy.  It is not.  It is an awful experience and one I would not choose to repeat.  Not one of the 400-plus women where I was housed would have chimed in that their time in prison, too, was the best of their lives.

     But for me, prison afforded a chance to focus on myself for a change.  

     I didn't have full-time responsibility of my 30-year-old son with autism, a person who needs 24-hour care (his brother took over that year, with help from paid, trained caregivers).  

     I didn't have thousands of patients whose needs always came first because they were so pressing and that was my commitment.  I didn't have an office staff to take responsibility for.  Or stacks of paperwork to do past midnight.  

     I didn't have to deal with farm chores, downed tree limbs, broken irrigation pipes, the neighbor's wayward cows, rotted fence posts, alligators in the pond, sick chickens, ants in the bees' sugar, the bush hog needing welding, the mower's belt breaking, a wobbling ceiling fan, mice in the barn, leaves in the gutters, wax myrtle taking over the pasture, crows stealing pears, whiteflies and sooty mold on the citrus.  There were no texts, emails, phone calls, tax returns, or bills to pay.   

     I was liberated from all the things that make life life, the interesting, the annoying, the splendid, the awful, the unforeseen.  I was on an adventure.  It appealed to the part of me that had been an anthropologist before I took up medicine.  How could I know anything about this other culture--now a huge aspect of American life--if I weren't part of it?  Now, I was part of it.