Doctors blocked from visiting Navalny in prison hospital

Multiple doctors are being blocked from seeing Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in the prison hospital as reports show his health is deteriorating in the third week of his hunger strike.

Anastasia Vasilyeva, Navalny’s personal doctor, along with three other medical staff members, attempted to see Navalny at the first prison he was in and the prison hospital he was transferred to, but were denied entry, The Associated Press reported.

Navalny is participating in a hunger strike to protest the prison not allowing him to see his personal doctor for leg and back pain.

Navalny was transferred to another prison hospital where officials called his condition “satisfactory” but his personal doctor said he “could die at any moment.”

A post on his Instagram on Monday shows Navalny expressing thanks for the international support he has received and saying he should be dead or in intensive care due to his health condition.

“I laughed when I saw medical luminaries’ comments that with such a level of potassium that I had in my tests, I should have been either in emergency care or in a coffin,” Navalny said. “No, they wouldn’t get me that easily. I wouldn’t be scared with potassium after Novichok.”

Navalny’s medical reports showed high potassium and creatinine levels. 

Navalny has only received one glucose injection, but the prison attempted to give him six other injections, Vadim Kobzev, Navalny’s lawyer, said.

“His arms are all blue with the shots” since the medical staff at the prison was not qualified to give him the injections, Kobzev said. 

“You would laugh if you see me now — a skeleton staggers around his cell,” the Instagram post says. “They can use me to scare children who refuse to eat: ‘If you don’t eat porridge, you will be like that man with big ears, shaven head and hollow eyes.’”