No special treatment was warranted, she insisted as the hunger strike wore on - although soon after its end, most of the prisoners' demands were quietly met. The hunger strikers, humiliated and angry over a similar and largely fruitless strike the year before, felt that once their course was charted, they could not depart from it. I didn't question it being worth it. But I don't think anyone imagined at the time there would be nine others dead as well. Muscles waste away, kidneys fail.
Sharp bones poke through flesh.
Thick green bile is vomited up. Lawrence McKeown knows this all too well. Among the final group of hunger strikers, he took himself to the very brink, refusing food for 69 days before slipping into a coma - whereupon his family gave permission for emergency treatment. He woke up in the hospital, realizing foggily that his family had gone against the wishes he so often repeated to them. We never talked much afterward about it.