(Minghui.org) While a medical doctor from Yunnan was imprisoned for his belief in Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa), he noticed strange sensations and pains in his body. His expertise and knowledge in medicine have led him to conclude that prison officials intentionally subjected him to poisonous chemicals and drugs in an attempt to harm his body and weaken his will. He still suffers the side effects to this day.
The following is Mr. Hu's personal account of his experience:
I was a staff physician at the Yunnan Provincial Psychiatric Hospital. Because of my faith in Falun Dafa, I was arrested in 2011 and sentenced to two years in prison.
While detained at a resort from October to November 2011 following my arrest, a guard recognized me and recalled arresting and escorting me to a forced labor camp in November 2004.
He threatened me and boasted that the local correctional facilities had a way of making a practitioner renounce his belief without having to lift a finger—they simply locked him in a small cell in which no one could last for more than a few days.
I didn't think much about it at the time. Only much later did I realize that I was poisoned in prison.
Because of my profession, I am more sensitive to substances and their side effects. I want to record what I have experienced and expose this cruel practice against Dafa practitioners for future investigation.
I suspect that the substances that were used on me fall into two categories. One that made me sleepy and drool was a conventional tranquilizer used to treat psychotic conditions. The ones that caused anxiety, rapid and irregular heartbeat, headache, and nausea are hypertension-inducing drugs.
Solitary Confinement
Torture Re-enactment: Handcuffed and shackled
I was sentenced and transferred from Wuhua District Detention Center to the Yunnan No. 1 Prison, Division No. 5 in December 2012. It didn't take the prison officials long to realize I was not going to give up my belief easily. I continued to practice Falun Dafa and was soon isolated from other inmates. My hands were cuffed and my feet shackled for the first four-plus months in solitary confinement.
The small cell that I was confined in was a coffin-shaped closet about five feet wide and six feet deep under the stairs on the first floor. There was a metal gate on one of the side walls. The cell sits a foot lower than the rest of the first floor.
My bedding was brought into the cell at 10pm every night and taken away at 6am. My hands were cuffed behind my back during the day and in front at night. The shackles stayed on.
After other detainees left for the forced labor workshop in the morning, the guards set up a speaker just outside my cell and, with at maximum volume, played a recording of the prison rules and regulations repeatedly, until the inmates came back from a full day of work. This continued for quite a while. My cuffs and shackles were removed after four months. They finally stopped playing the recordings as well.
Blacked Out
It was after lunch one day when I experienced a very strange black out. I was holding on to the metal gate with my left hand and drinking water out of a plastic cup in my right hand. After taking a sip, I felt that I was losing consciousness. I held on tight to the metal gate and locked my legs so I wouldn't fall.
I vaguely sensed the water leaking out of the corner of my mouth before I completely blacked out. I don't know how long it lasted–maybe just a few minutes, maybe half an hour. When I regained my consciousness, I found myself in the same position, standing with my left hand on the gate, but the cup was the floor. There was still water at the corner of my mouth.
Strange Sensations Caused by Substances in the Air
I was able to do the Falun Gong exercises every day without interference. When I meditated during the fifth exercise, I noticed that the exposed skin on my legs and my feet were hurting, as if getting scratched by a sharp object. I didn't pay much attention at first, thinking it was just pain from crossing my legs. But slowly, I realized it was caused by a substance in the air being in contact with my bare skin.
I started sensing the existence of this substance every day at about 30 minutes into my meditation. When it was only in the lower part of the room, the bottoms of my bare feet felt as if they were being pricked, scratched by a sharp object, or burned by tiny little particles that were high in temperature. The pain caused me to sweat.
As the substance rose in the air, my skin underneath the clothes felt tense and spasmodic. When the substance got to my nose, I could feel my lungs contracting. When I coughed afterward, I felt as if my lungs were being pricked by needles. However, the pain eased after a few coughs. Sometimes, I felt a tightness in my chest, as if someone was grabbing my back tightly.
There was something “alkaline” and “spicy” in the air. When I asked the inmates assigned to monitor me, they denied having done anything. The exposed skin on my hands and feet started to dry out in a few days to the point of chapping. The front of my ankles facing the gap under the gate started to have dark spots like fish scales.
Before I went to sleep at night, I always heard sounds like something was being popped or sprayed. It was not very loud, as if the person doing it didn't want to draw any attention. Because there was a big greasy stain on the floor near the gate, I always slept with my head on the other side of the room. I am very nearsighted and couldn't really tell what was going on outside of the gate.
If I let myself relax while lying in bed at night, I could feel the waves of something moving from my feet toward my head, like little crawlers or insects. The parts of my body that had been enveloped by the “waves” felt heavy. When the waves got to my head, I felt muddleheaded and started to lose consciousness.
I was often awakened by pain on the back of my feet and in between my toes, similar to the pain I had at the bottom of my feet when meditating during the day. I could sense the “spiciness” of the air that made my whole body warm. I tried to talk to guards and the deputy division head about this but never heard back from them. The situation, however, got worse and worse.
Stomach Pains
While I was confined to the small cell under the stairs, I couldn't get my own food at the cafeteria and was brought three meals by the inmates assigned to monitor me. During those months, I often felt sleepy after eating and drooled a lot. Sometimes, my hands and feet were shaking, and my heart rate went up to as high as 100 beats per minute.
If I induced vomiting, the symptoms disappeared. If I had a second helping of anything, it got worse. I got so bloated and nauseous after eating that I had to make myself throw up. If I didn't completely empty my stomach, I still felt nauseous.
My request to get my own food was turned down multiple times. To protest, I went on a hunger strike. Three days in, the prison officials arranged for my family to visit me. Right after the visit, I was taken to a meeting room with a group of people in plain clothes.
As one man recorded with a voice recorder and another took notes, a middle-aged man in glasses asked me a question about neurology and asked if I had experienced any changes in my senses. I thought it was strange that he asked, but I didn't respond.
My food seemed to be okay for a while after the hunger strike. However, similar symptoms returned soon. I realized that protesting was not going to change anything and I had to figure something out myself.
I started to rinse my food three times before eating. To replenish the lost salt, I bought pickled vegetables from the prison store. Luckily, they didn't stop me from rinsing my food, nor did they cut off my pickle supplies. I stopped rinsing the food after a while and found the food less problematic. When I did get nauseous after eating sometimes, I just made myself vomit.
Other Strange Things
New things started to happen just as I slowly recovered from the food poisoning. Beside what I have already described, I started to sense something new in the air that made my skin feel cool, heavy, and burnt.
When the wave of substance got to my lower body, I felt very cold, as if it was wet, but it felt dry to the touch. After consistently experiencing this, I started to feel numb. When I ran, I felt a drop in my lower stomach, and my chest tightened.
I usually meditated for two hours in the morning after everybody left for the workshop. I could feel that I was immersed in a substance, and the air was very acidic. I felt that my stomach walls were dissolving and had become so thin that they could start bleeding at any time.
When I was allowed to use the bathroom after breakfast, I mixed hot and cold to make three to four cups of warm water, drank it in three batches, and threw up after each time. The content of my vomit went from very acidic at first to close to a normal PH value, and then my stomach felt better. I did this every day. If I was denied access to warm water, I would have been very, very sick.
I woke up a few nights in a row feeling suffocated. My chest felt heavy, and my heart was beating very quickly. I couldn't breathe and felt like I was dying. One time, I felt that I was breathing in some kind of powder in the air and asked the guard to take me to the prison clinic. “Someone is trying to poison me,” I told the guard.
The inmate monitoring me heard and rushed into the cell. He covered my head with the comforter and shouted, “What powder?” His muscles were tense, but he didn't wrap the comforter tightly on my head. After a while, he went out and got new uniforms for me to change into.
I changed into my own clothes and sat down with my back against the gate until dawn. When the light just started to come into my cell, the inmate monitoring me called my name a few times just outside of the gate, but I didn't respond. I heard him murmuring to himself, “Is he dead?”
I went on a hunger strike, but the same thing happened again shortly after. Right after I woke up in the middle of the night one night, my nose started bleeding. It stopped after a few drops.
I went on a second hunger strike. The head of the Political Education Section visited me in my cell. After a brief conversation, he said, “The prison officials will not let you die.”
Though I didn't wake up in the middle of the night feeling suffocated anymore after that, all the other symptoms returned. I went on yet another hunger strike to protest but to little avail.
I was very healthy before the imprisonment and never had any heart problems. These things happened only while I was confined to the small room under the stairs.
Ringing in the Ear
After asking over and over again to have access to fresh air, the prison officials finally agreed to transfer me to a different cell.
While meditating one day, I heard a “puff” outside of the gate, and soon I started to have a sharp ringing in my right ear, which was facing the gate. My right ear felt like it was going to explode, and I was irritated and anxious. After I finished meditating, I dripped a little bit of warm water into my ear and let it drain after a few minutes. The ringing eased. After repeating a few times, it stopped completely.
A similar thing happened a few days later, only this time I felt more of a substance get into my ear. I tried to rinse it out as before, but it was not as effective. The ringing in my ear started to go away only after two days.
Poisoned at Detention Center
I was held at a detention center in August 2012 and had a trial scheduled for the next morning at the Kunming City Intermediate Court. I was awakened at 4am to be on watch and suddenly felt weak. My body started to sway back and forth, and I couldn't see anything except my own pupils. My heart rate went up to 100 beats per minute.
I gradually regained my vision after a while, and my body was able to move again. However, my stomach hurt badly, and I started having diarrhea. My body was weak, and I felt like I would collapse at any time. I didn't completely recover until later that morning.
Judging from that incident, maybe the practice of poisoning Dafa practitioners does not exist only in prison.
Side Effects
I suffered from many side effects long after my term ended. Right after I was released, my sense of smell was very dull. I couldn't smell flowers and light scents that others could. I also couldn't distinguish between different scents. Even now, I'm still very sensitive to dust and other things in the air that don't bother other people. I often feel short of breath.
My body is also not the same. My limbs, especially my lower body, often feels tightened. When I walk fast or run, my sense of position and movement, including balance, is off; my control over my muscles is not as good as it used to be.
If I stand in a narrow place and try to move something, I cannot stay balanced, and my back feels as if it would snap. When I walk or run, my muscles are very tense as if I have heavy objects hanging on my legs.
