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Co-workers turn soul sisters

A friendship blossoms between two corrections officers and when one has a stroke, the caring produces a bond like few others.

By JONATHAN ABEL
Published January 3, 2006

	[Times photo: Edmund Fountain]
	Nicole Hagins, left, 31, laughs with friend Lisa Vega, 37, at Hagins' home in Spring Hill recently. The Hernando County Jail guards have formed a strong friendship. Hagins has a variety of medical conditions and is off work, but Vega has solicited donations and spent $3,000 of her own money to help Hagins and her family. Vega also checks in on her regularly.

SPRING HILL - It was either August or September when Nicole Hagins passed out at the Hernando County Jail. She can't remember which month. The hematoma on her brain robbed her of her short-term memory, among other things.

But as she sits at home, consulting journals for the details, the 31-year-old Hagins cannot forget that she survived the night thanks to Lisa Vega, a fellow corrections officer who has been watching out for her ever since.

Hagins' medical problems began in 1997, when she was rear-ended in a car crash in Okeechobee. She entered the hospital with a headache and left with the help of a cane. She was heavily medicated for the next year and remembers very little.

"I wasn't able to walk and talk and eat and drink and function on my own," she said. "Then gradually I got better."

A corrections officer since 1994, Hagins clawed her way back, working for the Florida Department of Corrections in Okeechobee, the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office and finally the Hernando County Jail, which is operated by Corrections Corporation of America.

The headaches never fully went away. And they continued to worsen this summer until one day Hagins had a stroke.

"I knew I had a stroke and I wasn't feeling well, but we were shorthanded at work so I went anyway," she said.

That's when Vega stepped in.

"She checked on me constantly. She shared my duties - the truth is she put me in the corner and told me to sit there: "Let me do what you need to and just sit there."'

At some point during the night, the headache knocked her out.

"It was right before shift change, and me and another officer walked her to the vehicle and another officer drove (home) with her," Vega recalls.

Hagins was diagnosed with seven hematomas, or thin pockets of blood, on her brain. If one of them bursts, she said, she could easily have another stroke or die. She has not been back to work since then, and Vega has been taking care of her.

The two women have only known each other since last January, when Hagins started working at the jail, but they feel like sisters.

"I'm black and she's white, and people look at us so funny when I say that she's my sister," Hagins said.

"I tell them we're sisters from a different mother," Vega said.

Hagins has six children; she brags about the time she gave birth to twins in the back seat of her car at a RaceTrac gas station in St. Petersburg. Vega, who has four children and two stepchildren, has become the godmother for all of Hagins' kids, ages 11 months to 14 years old. Vega calls a few times a day and visits no fewer than four times a week.

Hagins knew her husband-to-be, Joshua Hagins, for three years before she ever saw him in person. She lived in Spring Hill; he lived in New York. He was a friend of her uncle's, and they courted each other for years over the phone.

It was Vega who finally paid for the plane ticket to send Hagins up to New York for the first face-to-face meeting. And Vega paid to bring him down from New York to Spring Hill when he decided to move here. The couple married in June.

That was all before Hagins collapsed at the jail.

Since then, Vega has organized donations not just from the jail, but from the Salvation Army, United Way, Publix and the Jerome Brown Community Center. On top of that, Vega spent more than $3,000 from her own pocket helping out Hagins' family with everything from food to the phone bill.

But she insists that she gets as much as she gives.

"She's been there for me in times when I needed her, when I recently lost my mother," Vega said. "I'm terribly worried about her. I think I drive her nuts calling her."

The prognosis for Hagins is unclear. In October, her doctor gave her only six months to live, but at her last appointment the doctor told her that the hematoma had gotten a little smaller - that she was improving. Her next doctor's appointment is this month. She hopes she will eventually be healthy enough to go back to work.

Hagins is proud of her job as a corrections officer and feels "useless" not being able to work. She wants people to know how much help she has received from Vega and others at the jail because people often don't think of the caring side of jail guards.

"Something so great ... came out of this place that had so many bad things coming out of it," Hagins said. "I've read some of the stories, and this is none of the sort."

--Jonathan Abel can be reached at jabel@sptimes.com or 352 754-6114.

[Last modified January 3, 2006, 01:57:16]