I also had a major health crisis when I was in prison. Ironically, when I was transferred to a low security facility after the court hearing. It was 7 months in remand before the hearing. In Bulgaria, once you serve half your sentence you can go into a low security 'open' prison. I was given a year, 8 month after arrest, so I had the option, and my Lawyer urged me to take it. It was actually a mistake.
Open prison in Bulgaria is not as nice as you might think. In the high security prisons, they segregate Bulgarians, Gypsies and Foreigners. Amongst the Bulgarians are the more scary, violent types, and the Gypsies are all scammers and thieves. The foreigners section the great majority, perhaps even 90%, are border jumpers, and they are not in for long, usually no more than 8 months total, and usually they have spent most of it already in remand.
In the open prison, however, you are surrounded by these other two groups, as a foreigner. I think generally, by the time the violent types have spent half their sentence, which will usually be more than 2 years, they are not quite so full of chutzpah and I didn't encounter any problems with them. But those gypsies, they never quit their wheedling and lying.
When I got there, they placed me in a cell with Gypsies and I got moved a few times, and indeed the first cell was a moldovian and an african, but every other cell in the one story complex was full of gypsies.
I developed a serious allergy problem - something that never came up before, despite no real change in the dietary regime, it was just the stress of this environment. I began to develop more and more frequent incidents of bronchoconstriction, and eventually one night I was kept awake all night, laboring to breath, sleepless, exhausted and my stress compounded upon what I already had to deal with. The prison administrators were immensely unhelpful with my situation. A doctor was called in the middle of the night and he gave me some ventolin, which stopped the attack immediately, but I was not given any to go on with.
There was a series of visits to the medical facility in the central prison, about 20km away, they tried giving me steroids, but steroids don't work with the type of asthma I have, because its cause is different. Eventually I figured out that it must be a diet thing, and with so much time on my hands, I started doing elimination testing, and would eat literally only type of food, and then nothing for at least 12 hours. I discovered the reaction was 8-12 hours after eating some particular thing. I tested out each different type of thing that was in the food provided to us, and basically, EVERYTHING triggered it, except meat.
Eventually after several visits to the doctors, I was given a drug called 'allergosan', Chlorpyramine, which has a little friendly wheat symbol on it, and when I took this drug, I got no allergic reaction to bread. But everything else still triggered it, milk, tomatoes, onions, even cucumbers and watermelon. The watermelon was a summer treat, but I could not eat it.
I managed to remain symptom free until the end of my sentence, but I was literally living a whole month on just plain bread and meat.
In some ways it was productive for me, as with all the available time I had, I did a very comprehensive dietary allergy testing protocol. I now know exactly what causes this problem and that stress and diet are the main factors. But I think also there is certain types of cold virus that also have to be part of the mix for it to get to the acute stage, which alters the surface of my lung tissue and exacerbates the problem (I think it is drying out, when it starts to get bad, I cough a lot, but there isn't any mucus. Because my bronchioles are contracted, the cough reflex is triggered, but in fact, I think when it's really bad, my lungs are dryer than normal, which makes the tissue more sensitive to obstructions.)
If I could go in a time machine and pop out and tell myself to not ask to be moved to the light regime, I would have. I don't think this heath problem would have come up in the Central prison without all these gypsies around. Also, in Bulgarian low security prisons, cash is permitted, this also was a factor in my stress because I increasingly had certain knowledge that I needed special diet and the only way I was able to get that, was buy buying non-allergen foods like eggs and sausages, and so on.