<Begin Segment 19>

TI: So tell me about the hospital. What was that like?

ES: Well, sad. They did have different situations where they have medical patients and pediatric and surgical and OB, and of course when I'm working a 3:00 to 11:00 shift I'm the only RN to take care of the whole hospital. But when there's a delivery or a patient in labor I had to take care of the patients in labor because they could have a baby just anytime or they might wait another night or something. You just have to be sure when they're gonna have a baby, and I was in, that was my specialty.

TI: But go back. You said from the 3:00 to 11:00 shift you're the only nurse there.

ES: RN.

TI: RN. And that's why they were so anxious to get you there, 'cause they were just so short-staffed with professional staff.

ES: Yeah. And they knew that I was, I would be taking care of the OB patients, babies and labor, mothers in labor, that I would be delivering the babies. And so it was, I don't know what they did when I'm not there because I only worked from 3:00 to 11:00.

TI: Because they didn't have any other RNs?

ES: No. Well, they had RNs but not in, that they specialized in that. But then they did have more doctors.

TI: And so if there were a delivery during a different shift would they bring you in? Like if it was in the morning or anything?

ES: No. They have a doctor usually. See, in the 3:00 to 11:00 shift a lot of times the doctors were not there all the time.

TI: Because they knew they had you there, probably.

ES: That's right. Yeah.

TI: And when you say, was it for the whole hospital or just the OB section?

ES: No, it was the whole hospital. 'Course, you know, we've had some real sad cases that happened in the hospitals too, because the aides that are working there -- they call 'em aides -- they have very little training before they're put on the floor to be with patients and they really don't know what they're, who they're taking care of. They'll put a thermometer in patients right down the line, they go down, put the thermometer in, and one patient was an epileptic and he bit the thermometer and bit into the mercury, died. Things like that. People don't hear about those sad things that happened, and that's because they haven't had training.

TI: So it was just the inexperience of these aides who you wouldn't, they wouldn't have the training to know better.

ES: That's right. And there's other sad cases like that that people don't know about.

TI: So why weren't there more professional staff brought in from the outside to take care of the hospital?

ES: Well, I don't know. They did have civil service nurses there, but they didn't know very much. They just sat there and watched us. We're all really volunteers, but they thought that Japanese should take care of their own, I guess.

TI: So even though they were getting paid much, much more than...

ES: Oh yes.

TI: Because in camp as a professional you got nineteen dollars a month, and they were probably getting hundreds of dollars.

ES: Sure. I don't know how the, what the salary was in those years, but it wasn't, it didn't compare with our nineteen dollars.

TI: Who would run the hospitals? Was there an administrator or did doctors run it, or how would that run?

ES: No, they had some administrator who came from maybe Minidoka, maybe they came from Twin Falls or someplace, I don't know.

TI: Okay, so are we talking about Minidoka now or Tule Lake? So at Tule Lake, we're still at Tule Lake?

ES: Tule Lake around California, somebody in...

TI: So California, maybe Klamath Falls.

ES: Klamath Falls. But it's very rare that we saw these people. Just name only. But in Minidoka, I think it was a little better in Minidoka because it was more established. Tule Lake was kind of sad. We were there just at the beginning, and we've had, I don't know, the Satos here in Seattle, it was, it was one of their family that the mother was pregnant and she had a heart condition, and they asked her to be given morphine so that she can die because she wanted, they wanted to deliver the baby and then she would die because there was nothing they can do for her. And I was there to take care of that too, and so I was supposed to give the shot, but I said no, I didn't feel like I should be responsible, so Dr. Ito from San Francisco, or Sacramento I think he was, gave her the morphine. And I sat there while she died. It was sad. The Sato family, and I think the Sato family was here in Seattle, but I never did meet them because I was in Uwajimaya one time, downtown Uwajimaya, and there was a Mr. Sato and I think it was a son of the Sato family, and I said, so I asked my brother, I said, "Is that the Mr. Sato that had this mother pass, die?" And he says yeah, he thought it was, because my brother worked at Uwajimaya. But then is he the one that had construction, big construction?

TI: John Sato.

ES: I think that was it.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.