<Begin Segment 68>

AI: And Tosh, you were continuing to work in the hospital, now at Minidoka, what about you, May?

MY: I don't think I worked for a while. I started probably through Tosh, they needed nurse's aides. And I started working as a nurse's aide in the hospital.

TY: Did you get paid six dollars a month there? Or was it eight dollars --

MY: I thought it was twelve.

TY: Was it --

MY: I thought the doctors got sixteen.

TY: Doctors got sixteen.

MY: Okay.

TY: And nurses got twelve, I think. And I think we --

MY: We just got --

TY: We got eight dollars, or six dollars.

MY: I don't even remember. Oh, yeah, six or eight dollars.

TY: Six or eight dollars a month.

MY: But, so I was, I worked as a nurse's aide, which is about all you could do, and, for a while, and then I handled the bedpans and that kind of thing, but then, then I started to work -- I don't know when it was -- in the emergency room, as a nurse's aide in there. Because after you accumulate some experience, I guess there was a... Natsuko, I think was, she was the head nurse. And they said they needed somebody in the emergency room, in the clinic, in the emergency clinic. So I started working there at night. And I think I took --

TY: Oh, yeah, out-patient ward.

MY: Oh, I see, okay. So it was something like four to midnight, or something like that, that I worked for a while. So that was a pretty good shift. My son works like that now, but working from four to midnight, and then walk home at midnight. And then, then I started working from midnight to eight in the morning because I was writing a lot. And there's nothing happening, if somebody doesn't get hurt or injured, or nobody comes in, so it's very, very quiet. So I got to know the ambulance drivers a lot. 'Cause they didn't have anything to do, either. So we just sat around. But, unless there was some busy activity, when people got sick and so forth. So that was pretty cushy job that I had. [Laughs]

<End Segment 68> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.