<Begin Segment 24>

MA: So we were talking about your, about Tule Lake, and your job as a lab technician in the hospital there. So I wanted to go back and ask a little bit about, about the hospital. And if you could describe what the camp hospital looked like and how it was run and all of that.

KB: Okay. It was one of, one of those buildings similar, similar to the barracks, but I think a little better built inside. And it was long, one story, and the facilities were fairly good. I mean, they had operating rooms, they had laboratories, they had, I know they had a place for a demented patient. They had isolation section, there were some tuberculosis patients, then they had the men's ward and the women's ward. They were quite large, I think they maybe took thirty or forty beds. That may be a little exaggeration, I don't know. Anyway, it was a good size hospital, and we had doctors from the San Francisco Bay area. I think they were especially assigned to Tule Lake because their families, their families were with them, but a lot of the other Californians who were in Tule Lake were not from the Bay Area, they were from Sacramento, more inland, Fresno, Sacramento, Marysville. So I think these were, I'm not sure they were volunteers, but anyway, they were assigned to this hospital. And the nurses also were from the San Francisco area, and actually, well-trained RNs were in charge of the wards. And then they had the evacuees work as, in the lesser important, or lesser jobs like there were these girls who were nurse's aides, there were dieticians, kitchen help, helpers, and secretaries and so forth. So, and then we had two interns who were students at the University of San Francisco, University of California at San Francisco medical school, young, young doctors. And then we had this laboratory, which was very well-supplied. It had almost all the equipment that any hospital laboratory would have. And we had, the one fellow was a registered lab technician, and I think he was from Tacoma. Then we had, a bunch of us were pre-meds, some from California and some from Washington. So the registered technicians taught us a lot more about the lab work than I had ever known.

MA: How many lab technicians were there working with you?

KB: Well, see, we covered twenty-four hours, so during the day, maybe there were, like, ten. And then I know there was one guy that liked to work from midnight 'til seven, and so he was the only one on from ten to seven. And then there were, like, five or six of us from four to midnight. So there were quite a good number of technicians.

MA: And did you usually work five days a week, or every day?

KB: Seems to me we must have days off. I think five days a week. And the head technician made out the schedule. And it didn't really matter if one person was not there because there were plenty of personnel to carry on the work.

MA: So what types of things did you do every day? Like can you describe your typical day in the lab and what you would, what type of work you would do?

KB: We'd go and collect blood, do venipunctures, and we would then have to do the analysis of the blood, all different chemistries that need to be done, urine samples to examine, make solutions for the tests. A variety of work in the lab.

MA: What were the most common illnesses that you saw with the people in Tule Lake? What were some, yeah, the common ailments?

KB: Basically, almost any kind of illness that would occur in any community. I think there was a variety, female diseases, pneumonia, appendicitis. I know there were some cancer patients, because at one time, it was very common for Japanese men to get stomach cancer. There were psychiatric patients, there was a psychiatric ward. So quite a variety of illnesses. Female, I know there a number of female problems and then there were babies being delivered. So it was like a general hospital.

MA: And were you living, where was the hospital in relation to your family's barrack? Was it very far?

KB: It was far. It was far because we were, the hospital was near the entrance to the camp, and then we were clear over in "Alaska." [Laughs]

MA: In "Alaska."

KB: So there was a bus that would pick me up and take me to the hospital or I could walk, but after a while, I got acquainted with several other girls, and we had our own "apartment," quotation marks, in one of the barracks near the hospital so we could just walk over when we were on duty. And one of them was a dietician, and she would bring us food, extra food. One was a ward nurse, and one was, I guess she was more like a clerk. And then I worked in the laboratory. We got along very well, we shared this one barrack so we had four cots lined up in a row. We actually didn't spend too much time in there except to sleep. We were always doing other things.

MA: At that point, your father had been reunited with the family back in Pinedale, so it was your mother and father and your siblings. How was everyone, especially with your younger siblings, how were they dealing with being at Tule Lake and all of that?

KB: Well, my younger two sisters were still in school, so they had to go to school. And I think my one sister graduated from Tule Lake High School 'cause I remember there's an album that they made, like an annual, high school annual, and she's in there. My, the youngest sister, poor thing, I mean, she was at Tule Lake, and then after my family left, she had to go another school, and every time the family moved she had to go to another school. So it was kind of rough on her. But I think the children in the camp probably got a decent education. There were enough schoolteachers and also some outside teachers were there to help the students.

MA: Were you able to correspond with, I know you had a tight-knit group of friends from the University of Washington. Did you correspond with them? Were you able to keep in touch?

KB: Yes, we did keep in touch. I'm trying to think... they moved on with their careers also, and one of them stayed in Seattle, she was a schoolteacher, and another one was, she was a microbiology major, she went to Yale and got her nursing degree, got a master's in nursing, and another one was in microbiology, and she went into research. Another one went to medical school, so we all kind of scattered, but we kept in touch with each other.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.