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TI: So in all, with all this experience, I have thoroughly enjoyed the field of vascular surgery. Other than the procedure that I devised for an endarectomy which I mentioned known as the Inahara procedure, I have also developed a carotid shunt. A shunt is a device by which you route circulation temporarily through a bypass, and I conceived the idea, when you obstruct an artery, the organs can tolerate loss of circulation for varying periods of time depending on what the organ is. However, if you shut the circulation off to the brain, the brain does not tolerate but more than two or three minutes of clamping and shutting off the circulation. So one has to use a shunt to restore the blood flow while you are working on the artery which is open. The old method was to just merely place a tube within the artery, and to keep the blood vessel from leaking, you had to put a tourniquet around the tube in the artery. Well, this became a problem because when you're trying to clean out the artery thoroughly, you had to see both ends of the cleanout. And in order to do this, I thought that if the lumen of the artery could be occluded using a balloon inside the artery rather than a tourniquet, this would make the operation safer and more thorough. So I patented the idea and decided that I would try to build this particular shunt. And finally, I was able to get together with another vascular surgeon who also had the same idea and came to me to join in making this device. We got a third partner in, who was a businessman who was in the medical field, and we formed the company called the Ideas for Medicine and began manufacturing this device. This was the first shunt that were, it was made in this fashion, and it currently is still in use. Subsequently, we have transferred our company to another company since we both are retired.

The field of vascular surgery is rapidly changing, and I still attend meetings twice a week to keep up with the changes, but also to participate in the discussions of handling problem cases. Meetings are held at Saint Vincent's Hospital and also at the university. I have thoroughly enjoyed surgery in this field. And for the first six months or so, a year after my retirement, I still missed being in the operating room. But however, one has to accept the fact that you have to retire sometime. But if I were to do this over again, my life over again, I think I would still do the same thing. It's been a wonderful career.

[Interruption]

TI: In performing operations of a vascular nature, we had to have a team. We had certain nurses that were trained specifically for this. At one time, I even hired my own nurse to work with me in the operating room, and also we had to have an anesthesiologist who was familiar with my procedures but also to give the type of anesthesia that would work best for doing vascular surgery. Well, this particular anesthesiologist was an Irishman. Of course, he was a graduate of Irish Medical School. He became an internist and trained in Switzerland. And after that, he decided to migrate to Canada and began practice as an internist, but he soon found out that this was not his field, so he quit his practice and decided to go to California. On his way through, he stopped in Portland to see a friend, and he liked the city so well, he decided to stay in Portland and also decided to change his specialty. He enrolled in the anesthesia residency program at the University of Oregon and became an anesthesiologist. But it so happened that he began working at Saint Vincent's, and we became a good team to do this kind of work. He had friends in Ireland, of course, and every summer for about five years, his good friend came from Ireland who was a thoracic surgeon, and he came to watch how vascular surgery was done here in United States because in Ireland, vascular surgery had not advanced this quickly. He would go back and do vascular surgery along with his chest surgery. Well, it turned out that he became the president of the Irish Royal College of Surgeons. He invited me to be a speaker at their meeting in Dublin, and so I accepted and went to Dublin and presented two papers. My wife and I flew to Shannon, and we had a little bit of bad luck as the Northwest Airlines lost our baggage, so we had to stay in Shannon until the baggage caught up with us. We then hired a car, rented a car and drove from Shannon through the south of Ireland, Cork, through the countryside and ended up in Dublin and stayed there for a week or so. After the meeting, well, I presented two papers at the meeting, and of course, English is the spoken language there, so we had no problems in translations or interpretations, but it was a fun trip. The Irish people out in the country are very kind. They are so hospitable. We traveled by car on narrow roads, so narrow that we had to pull off the road to let the oncoming car by. We stayed at bed and breakfast which was a nice experience. We had the Irish oatmeal every morning which is quite different than ours. We drove across from Dublin to Galway, and Galway was the home of this particular chest surgeon. His name was Des Necie. And we stayed there with him, and he showed us the countryside, showed us his hospital. And then we ventured down south again to Shannon and back home again. You know they drive on the wrong side of the road in Ireland, and this became a problem. Just before we got to Dublin, we were going through a small village, and we came to an intersection, it was a six-way crossing. And much to my confusion, I had a fender bender. It was embarrassing, but the party was very understanding. And I had caused damage to his vehicle, and he says, "Oh forget it, I just won't do anything about it." And I said, "No, please, get it repaired because I'm covered with insurance." So I talked him into getting it done, and I gave him all the information. But that was fortunately the only minor event that I experienced.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.