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Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Stanley N. Shikuma Interview I
Narrator: Stanley N. Shikuma
Interviewer: Barbara Yasui
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: October 11, 2022
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-517-17

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SS: And I decided... I was thinking I would go into clinical lab medicine, get a degree in that. So clinical lab medicine is like when you get a blood test and they draw your blood and they send it to a lab. So the clinical lab tech folks are the ones who run the test and read the results and give the reports to the doctors. So I was thinking I would do that because I had all the classroom prerequisites already done, I could finish that program in a year. But after we got here, I had a friend who was doing exactly that job at Harborview, one of the big hospitals here in Seattle, and she hated her job. She said, "Yeah, you got to sit in this room by yourself and all these machines whirring, and there's no windows, and you only see another person every hour or two, and usually they're just delivering samples." Said, "Yeah, it's a miserable life." Then I had another friend here who was working as a nurse on the cardiac unit at the University of Washington, and she loved her job. Said, "Oh, yeah, every day is different and we had all these people, and doctors and nurses you worked with, and the patients were wonderful." So I decided, well, maybe I should do nursing instead of lab med. But that meant I would have to go through a three-year program, the nursing school program. So I spent a year getting my residency in Washington state so I wouldn't have to pay out of state tuition, and applied to nursing school and then got in and graduated from that in '85.

BY: So what did you do during that year that you were establishing your residency?

SS: That year? Well, one thing is I took a psychology course at the University of Washington, because that was the one prerequisite to the nursing school program that I did not have yet. So that was one thing. But then I did all these odd jobs. So one was cleaning sani-cans, but it was kind of a... in looking back, I think it was kind of a fly-by-night outfit, because the truck he had, the guy who owned it told me that, "Okay, so you got to drive this truck around and drop off sani-cans at every place, put a new one down and take out the old ones, or clean out the old ones," because there was a big vacuum tank on the truck. He said, "But if you see a sign that says trucks are supposed to pull off for inspection, you got to avoid that at all costs." But anyway, I didn't do a good job, so that was the only job I have ever been fired from. After two or three weeks, he said, "I'm sorry, not cutting it, so I'm going to have to let you go." Then I got a job as a chimney sweep in the north end, so I would go all over the north end of Seattle cleaning people's chimneys. So climbing up on the roof and running a brush down, scraping off creosote, and I did that for several months until it got too cold and wet to be climbing on roofs.

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