<Begin Segment 29>

DG: So what were your thoughts at that time as far as your practice goes?

BU: Practice? As long as I was with, with the kidney team. In the very beginning we didn't have a kidney center where they did dialysis so you had to go to a hospital to get the dialysis. So I used to go all over the city of Seattle, and it took twelve hours to dialyze and break it down and bring it back here. So we couldn't, I couldn't open an office so I closed the office while I was doing dialysis. But the bad part is I never got paid for any of the things I did by research or otherwise. So two years I was out of commission.

DG: Even after you opened your office?

BU: That's right.

DG: So what kind of hours did you have at your office, then?

BU: The office didn't have any office hours while I was doing dialysis in the hospitals.

DG: So that was around '57? Never got paid.

BU: Huh?

DG: We're talking about 1957.

BU: Yeah, 1957, '58.

DG: And the dialysis was like at Providence or the University?

BU: Providence, Swedish, Virginia Mason, Harborview, everywhere.

DG: Well, so who supervised this whole thing?

BU: My boss.

DG: Who was that?

BU: Dr. Belding Scribner.

DG: And he was, his office was where?

BU: He was the Professor of Nephrology at the University of Washington Medical School.

DG: And you went into this nephrology because of your experience with the kidney machine.

BU: The kidney machine in Korea and then I went and took two years of fellowship, and then after finishing the nephrology fellowship, I was supposed to open an office, but it never worked that way.

DG: So were some of those patients that were in dialysis your patients?

BU: No, not many. Most of them came whoever had problem.

DG: Well, then, what was your job as far as the...

BU: Running the dialysis machine.

DG: And what did that entail?

BU: That entailed watching that machine for ten hours. [Laughs] And the only other job I had, I was -- did you see that the Times... Life Magazine, which they had ten guys, ten guys with hoods on making a decision as to whether this person gets on dialysis or not. It means either you live or you die. I was one of those ten guys that we met once a week.

DG: Where did you meet?

BU: We usually in the hospital.

DG: At Providence?

BU: At Providence or Swedish and we decide somebody would present the patient and team would see what kind of patient it is. The one I remember most is... one was a twenty-five-year-old boy, but he was delinquent, and then the opposite to him was a woman, thirty-something, who had four kids. You had to choose one or the other and we felt that this woman would be more appropriate than the delinquent twenty-five year-old so we took it. The delinquent died and this mother with four kids, she came to the twenty-fifth reunion of all the patients we had on dialysis. Saved, to see what they did with their life. It was very interesting. It was a, it was a reception or thing of what happened to all our patients that we dialyzed. There was one guy who was a professor of mathematics from back in Pennsylvania somewhere. He came to the damn thing. Well, here we saved this guy's life and he still a professor and still teaching. So, therefore, what happened is the fact that all those things after the fact, you show that we did some good. By that time we started, we started the kidney dialysis center.

DG: So there were just maybe a few, one or two dialysis machines in the city, probably, in the beginning.

BU: Yeah. They finally got, all those other places have ten or fifteen dialysis machines.

DG: And so did you continue to --

BU: No, I didn't. Ruth said that I done enough so we quit. I quit.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.