<Begin Segment 24>

MY: At some point in the turn of that year, I had to have a hysterectomy. I was having trouble with these polyps, I guess, I was having -- what do they call it? In my, I was heavily bleeding. So I went to a gynecologist and he said I had to have a hysterectomy. And, but he says, he could hear my asthma, you know, my breathing, and he said, "I'm not going to do surgery on you until you go see a lung specialist, and that specialist has to sit in on the surgery to stand by in case the anesthesia, you know, if you succumb to the anesthesia." So I went to a lung specialist and he was the one, he was an emphysema expert, specialist in emphysema. And he listened to my lungs and took, did all kinds of tests, and he said, "You don't have emphysema. You just have asthma that's been very mistreated," that my lungs were just packed in with all the antihistamines that were packing in all the mucus in my lungs, and so he said it's going to take a while to clear that out, so I had to go to the hospital to get all that gunk cleared out of my lungs. And then after that, I went to surgery and I came out of this like whoa, you know, people, most people walk around the street not worrying about not being able to breathe any second. [Laughs] It was kind of a revelation and it was just... and I at that point, I thought well, when you have that kind of an experience I think you think, "I'm not going to sit around, I have to do something." I mean, who knows when a person is going to die? I just knew because I had this condition, but a lot of people, you know, it might be this year, it might be next year, you know, it could be anybody. You might die in a year, you might die in ten years, who knows? So I just decided that I would do something with my life, and I, so I got involved in different kinds of things like the women's movement.

AI: Wow, that is just... what an amazing series of events in your life, in your emotional life, too.

MY: Yeah, right.

AI: Just thinking that you're going to die, perhaps at any time of the year, and then having this, changing your life and then finding out that that diagnosis was wrong.

MY: Yeah, and my children -- Jeni and I have talked about it and we have written things together about it, because it was very traumatic for her. Because I didn't, we didn't tell the children anything about this. Jeni said she knew somewhat but she... she was old enough to understand, I could have talked to her about it. But she said, "You know what you did, essentially, is you distanced yourself emotionally from the children," which I probably did. I don't remember that too vividly because I was too caught up in... I worried about the children getting along with each other. And it's great, all four of them really love each other. My two sons live (together) with their wives; and my two girls, my children are all very close. And I remember thinking that if I die, they need each other, you know, and I used to get livid when they fought or they argued and that, I was very, very scrupulously attentive to the fact that they were, that they had to be close to each other. But other than that it's probably true that I didn't pay much attention to their schoolwork or what they were doing or what they were getting involved in. But somehow, my kids just grew -- [laughs] -- like Topsy, they just, they just grew. And it was just incredible luck, you know, and I have had incredible luck of having wonderful men in my life.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.