Almost two years ago, after the guilty verdict came down, former House Speaker Sal DiMasi made one request. He asked if he could do his time in a prison close to home.
 

Sal wasn’t asking for himself, but for his wife, Debbie, who had undergone a bilateral mastectomy shortly before.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons shipped him to Kentucky.

Sal is now 18 months into his eight-year corruption sentence, and he has a less than 50-50 chance of living to his release date, Debbie DiMasi told me yesterday. Fate has handed her husband a far more ominous sentence than any judge could, and the notion of punishment has assumed a harshness that goes beyond the scope of the crime.

“After the chemo and radiation he’s received,” Debbie DiMasi said, “doctors down there say Sal has about a 40 percent chance of survival over the next five years.”

The cancer that took hold in the back of Sal’s tongue and throat shortly after he entered prison early last year — and was left untreated for seven months — has now resulted in the destruction of his saliva glands, the repeated closing of his esophagus and a fluid buildup on the lymph nodes in his neck.

Sal DiMasi is now 684.5 miles away in a prison medical facility in Butner, N.C. The wife he once worried about is now the steel-willed advocate who steadied herself yesterday to call prison officials in Butner and urge them to restore her husband’s allotment of the liquid supplement Boost.

“Without those added calories, he’ll die,” said Debbie DiMasi, who just completed her own reconstruction surgery. “He gets 15 minutes to eat, and swallowing even the softest foods is very difficult, so he isn’t able to take in the nourishment he needs.”

Even with a feeding tube inserted into his stomach, Debbie noted that Sal has lost more than 50 pounds.

“This isn’t unique to Sal,” she said. “It’s very hard to be an advocate for yourself in a system that plays by its own rules.

“Sal told me not long ago about this inmate on his floor who was having dizzy spells and passing out,” Debbie said. “He had told the doctors about the situation without much of a result. Then, when we had just come back home from a weekend visit, Sal calls to say, ‘Remember that guy I was telling you about, the one with the dizzy spells? He just collapsed and died in the shower.’”

If justice were to be tempered with a bit of mercy, Sal DiMasi would find himself headed back here to a hospital bed at the Devens medical facility.

Debbie DiMasi didn’t make that pitch herself. So, I will.

It’s time to bring Sal DiMasi closer to his family.