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PW: So you ended up at UC San Francisco. Did you move to San Francisco?

KY: Yeah, I moved to San Francisco. I'm coming off of the best years of my life, I'm going into the worst. I moved to San Francisco... where did I live at first? Oh, I found myself a place to live on Cole Street. You know, as soon as I walked into that first class, I don't know what it was. And I just had a really hard time. It was like I had experienced two years of being an adult, being free, and then all of a sudden like I'm back in high school. And it just was really hard. Plus the teaching was horrible. I mean, the teaching was... like a professor, with some fancy professor, right, would come and teach one class. I mean, there was, (no) continuity in the class, it just was horrible. And then I had this boyfriend who I really liked who was one of the graduate students. Right when... he was off to do a postdoc right in middle of my first year of medical school. He was, as a white guy whose mother had gone to law school, he was very supportive of my going into, of my going to medical school. But this was the days of... we smoked a lot of marijuana. So as soon as the weekend came -- oh, and homemade beer, people were making homemade beer. So homemade beer while we were making dinner, eating it. And then after dinner, it would be smoking a joint. And then he was particularly fond of cognac, so we had cognac there, too. So guess what? Like the next day, I wasn't very clearheaded, and I think we did the -- I mean, this will be Friday, Saturday, Sunday night. And what happened with the end result was I failed anatomy. And I have never, I'd never gotten anything lower than a B in school, and I failed anatomy. It just was... I mean, I was a wreck, it was horrible. And I think by this time the boyfriend had moved to Cambridge to do a postdoc at MIT. So it was bad, it was bad. Most of the other students who failed anatomy were black or brown, so they were kind of surprised that I failed. [Interruption] It was an oral exam, two big white people in white coats were giving me an oral exam. And one male, one female, both very imposing, tall white people, doctors. And they asked, the first question was something about the parasympathetic nervous system, which was, to me, was hardly anatomy, it was more physiology, and I kind of blanked. And so basically it got bad from there, and I failed anatomy. So because I was not black or brown, I think, I got special sessions with the professor in anatomy. We went to the lab and worked with me and said, "You shouldn't have failed this." I mean, he could tell.

[Interruption]

PW: Were you able to make up the course, or what happened?

KY: Oh, yeah. So I worked with this professor a few times, and then they passed me.

PW: So those two years in particular at med school were very difficult because you were just having trouble with the academic?

KY: Well, I mean, I didn't like it. I mean, I didn't like it. There were a lot of people like me who were a little bit older, and there were a lot of us who still had this sort of anti-establishment thing from our days at Berkeley or wherever. So we were not the favorites of the more standard professors, the more liberal humanitarian people, professors liked us, they thought we were very humane. But to the standard professors, we were unruly. I knit a lot, and I was one of the back three rows. Other people in the back three rows were reading the newspaper, we were bad. We were disrespectful, but older. We were older, we weren't like straight from college. The first two years were not great, also because my boyfriend, we had broken up, he had gone. But then by the second year we got back together again somehow. Once I got into the rotations in the hospital, it wasn't quite so bad, but I wasn't prepared. I didn't know anyone who was a doctor, I didn't know that being a doctor meant staying up all night or working all night. And I didn't understand the responsibility that was involved with being a doctor, and I also had a hard time giving orders to others. I was a lab technician, I was a good lab technician. I could anticipate what my boss needed, which pipette, bring it out, I knew. But if I did that, the older residents said, "Well, no, don't do that, the nurses will clean it up." And I had to learn a whole new thing about giving orders. But it was just the responsibility part, I had never been responsible for anything, and to be responsible was hard, was very hard for me. I don't think I was a great medical student, but I got through. I chose to do a residency in a non-academic place. I could have gone to San Francisco General, they wanted me in Fresno. Oh, I did some rotations in Fresno, and it was great, but I didn't want to be in Fresno. They had a really good family practice program there, the head if it was this hippie from UC. So I went to Seattle, to a small family practice program which only had four residents per year. And it was kind people. My residency mates were a Sansei woman from Idaho, a Jewish radical feminist from New Jersey, a Hawaiian Chinese guy from Honolulu, and me. And we were really unusual. I mean, given Seattle, it was a very unusual group. And to have three out of the four be women, there had only been one woman previously, and she was like six-foot tall. So it was a good place, and the residency directors were really kind people, I mean, just amazingly kind. And they would say that they had to learn how to deal with residents who were crying, because we all cried, because it's hard, I mean, it's rough. But they were kind, and I got through that, but never went back to Seattle really.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.