<Begin Segment 35>

AI: So, what, from your experiences both working there and also being a patient, what was your, how did you feel about the medical care there?

PB: Well, one thing, being a patient and being the one that's working there is two different experiences. And when you're the patient, you really realize that the slightest movement of the bed, or if you cough, for instance, you have surgery on your abdomen or anything, it's terrible if you cough. My goodness, it just feels like you're being split wide open. It just seemed like you're being torn. And you don't realize that unless you're a patient, and I fully realized what a difference it was. Say, for instance, a person is mopping the floor or something, and they bump the bed. You can feel it if you're in that bed, you really feel it. And, of course, if you didn't have that experience, you'd never know that. But I fully realized what a difference it was.

And I had quite an experience, because there was a mental case that... I was in the women's ward, and we had a woman that was mentally unbalanced. So she was kept in a room by herself, and she didn't have anything like a fork or knife available to her, because she was, she'd get dangerous at times. She seemed perfectly normal, but mental patients, I found out, they suddenly will do something that you least, unexpected times. And she said she was from Kumamoto, the same place as my parents, so she would talk to me quite readily and seemed quite friendly. But one day, they wanted to change her garments, because she'd been wearing the same one for quite a while, so they wanted to give her a new gown. So anyhow, we got her undressed, and, but then she wouldn't get dressed. She refused to wear the new gown. She just stayed in the nude, and she just absolutely refused. And, of course, when you throw a gown down the chute, well, it takes a while to get that gown. But they finally had to retrieve the old gown, because she wouldn't wear anything else.

And another time, she was out, and she was always quite friendly with me. But she got bad that day, and for some reason, she wasn't at all friendly. And all of a sudden, she grabbed the keys from the head nurse, and then she got herself in her room, and she locked the door and she wouldn't open the door. So there was no way that we could get her out, because she wouldn't come out, so then it was around lunchtime, and all the girls went to lunch. I was on duty, so I was going down the hall to put a compress on one of the patients. Then all of a sudden, I hear the door open, and she got out. And then she ran out the door, and so, of course, I ran down to the, the lunchroom and said a patient was out of the room, had fled out the door. So then they sounded alarm, and the loudspeakers went on all over the whole complex. And she was running -- I don't know where she thought she was going, but she was, she ran out, and 'course, lot of people went out after her. But she's a fast runner, she was a big woman, and she was running, and they were looking; they could see her, but they couldn't catch up with her. And it just happened that my brother-in-law, who drives a truck, was driving one of the trucks, and he saw her running, and he offered her a ride. [Laughs] And she thought, oh, this is great, she's going to get a ride, so, of course, she hops right in the car. So then he brings her back to the hospital. But it was quite an exciting time, because she could have... well, I don't think she could have gotten out of the complex, because there's always the guard towers. But she came back so willingly because she thought she was getting a ride out of the place.

AI: Oh, my.

PB: I had a lot of experiences, and you have to be so careful. Like, as one becomes more experienced, you get to give medication to the patient, the head nurse would measure out the medicine, then you're assigned to give it to the patients. But you got to be very, very careful, because you can give the wrong medication to the wrong patient. And you learn a lot, because you see patients of all different kinds. I saw people with cancer, and at that time, I didn't know what cancer was, and I thought, oh, something that would happen to maybe very, very few people. And cancer, you know, is a terminal disease. So I used to worry about people that had cancer, and then there were people in there that, having a change of life, and they get hallucinations. There was one woman in there, she kept saying there was horses up in the ceiling. And then there were people that I would give alcohol rub, and they would look forward to that, because that was something little extra, and lying in bed, you give 'em an alcohol rub, and it's really a very pleasant feeling, 'cause I've had that done for me, and they'd look forward to that. And I saw people that had tubes, just hooked up to all kinds of tubes, and under the bed, draining into jars, and I took care of my sister. She had surgery when she was in Tule, and I had to administer oxygen to her, which I thought at the time was something really important, but now, I find that oxygen is just, giving a little oxygen, but at the time, I thought, with this oxygen tank sitting next to her bed and everything, and you had to turn it on. And I thought that was quite a thing, but really, oxygen is nothing.

But you learn so many different things, and later on, we learned to test urine for diabetes, and then further along more, we started taking blood pressure, and then we're gonna start using needles. I hated needles myself, so I didn't think I could ever stick someone else. [Laughs] I decided then, "I don't think I'm gonna like this." I wanted to become a nurse, but I thought, "No, I don't think I like to stick needles into people." So I finally decided to leave the hospital work, because -- I did, however, move... we work about three months in each department, like there was a women's ward, men's ward, pediatrics, and TB ward, all different wards. And I had worked in the women's ward and men's ward, and I was hoping that I would get to the OB where I could, where people are happy, not sad. But I didn't quite get to the OB ward. But I did work in pediatrics, and I took care of a little boy that had TB and had to be very careful of... you wear a special gown, you handle the food differently, you can't take anything out of the room, you just have disinfectant sitting outside the door, and then you just drop everything in there. People would always say, "Oh, you smell so antiseptic. You smell like Lysol. We know you work in the hospital." But I like that smell. I like that clean smell of Lysol.

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.