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GY: And I worked in the hospital because I had taken biology, and I thought, male nurse kind of thing. Well, what the hell. And I'm going to do something that I kind of, might be fun. So I worked in the hospital, and there were several others who worked as an orderly. And we wore, what we wore was those gowns -- the hospital gowns where you just tie the back, it's open in the back, that it's kind of embarrassing for patients. [Laughs] Well, that was our gown. And what we did was to empty bedpans. We were bedpan jockeys, bedpan jockeys, and we provided enemas. And it was a kind of joke between several of our male orderlies, the triple-H enemas: high, hot and helluva lot. [Laughs] If there were patients who were kind of nasty to us or something, we'd give them this triple-H enema. I don't know if we did or not, but it was kind of a joke. But it was neat in that I was able to observe a little bit more about what it means to provide health services to human beings. I was in the surgery. I observed my first surgery. It was a hysterectomy. And the Nisei nurse was very kind enough to let me observe. "Don't you want to come see?" "Oh, yeah, of course." So I had to scrub, put my mask on, and I (stood) and watched. And pretty soon after the, the lady was under the anesthesia, the surgeon, Nisei doctor, he got his -- this sharp, sharp knife -- what do you call these knives? Is there a special name for that?

AI: Scalpel?

GY: Scalpel, right. And opened this area here, and the bright lights were shining. And he got the scalpel, and he did this right here. And right down this abdomen, and it was hysterectomy, right down here. And there is a lot of fat here, and just being open like that. I thought, whoa. [Laughs] And the nurse kind of looked at me and said, "You okay, George?" "Yeah, I'm okay." And as he started to open a little further and the blood started to ooze out and he started messing around in there, "George" -- and the nurse kept on asking, "You okay, George?" "Yeah, I'm okay." And pretty soon, well, I'd better -- think I'd better leave. "George, you'd better go outside," and I didn't see the rest of the operation. But that was the first experience. And I had these new experiences that were pretty neat. And I met young ladies who were in nurses training, young girls. And it was kind of neat to meet kids from this part of the country, or the state -- mostly California, of course. Meet with them and learn about working with patients. In fact, the first night I was on duty, it was from -- I guess I had the midnight shift, yeah. The swing shift was 4:00 to 12:00, 12:00 to 8:00, yeah. And so my, my job was to go through the, the ward, and men and women in the ward, and check the pulse rates. I don't know about the temperature, but anyway, in doing that, I found an old man all curled up, and he had died during the night. So again, I had to prepare him to take him to the... again, the, the cold room, where we kept the corpses -- what was that now? Word, something where you keep --

AI: Mortuary?

GY: Well, I guess the mortuary, the place where they kept the bodies. Well, it doesn't matter.

AI: The morgue?

GY: The morgue, yeah. I guess there was a makeshift morgue there. And I had to, to plug all the openings and to tie the arms and the legs and close the mouth kind of thing. Again, a new experience and kind of neat. It was kind of scary, frightful at times, but it was something -- I, really accepted that because it was new, and I felt kind of sorry for this old man, but I, some things I had to do, and he died. And we thought, "Well, how come? Hey, Doc, how come?" "Well, he's probably died of old age," kind of thing. That was that.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.