Barbara Johnson, Part 1, Transcript Section 3

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Barbara Johnson, Part 1
Transcript Section 3

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BARBARA: -- the 20 years that I spent, you know, doing that kind of work in Angoon, doing work there. And we had -- we didn't have a clinic, we used to work out of our homes.

KAREN: Wow.

BARBARA: And just carry our medicine bag around with us.

KAREN: It must have been hard.

BARBARA: Well, it was. Yeah. You know, it was. But we didn't have clinic hours like, you know, we did later on. But we started -- the Public Health nurse let us use her little clinic there in Angoon, so that was the -- in the school basement.

KAREN: Oh, yeah?

BARBARA: And then after that, we got another clinic in the school itself.
So we had two -- two health aides there, Jessie Jim was my coworker. We worked together quite a bit. And we also did -- we did our EMT training also, so we were EMTs.

That was one of the things we had to do under our guidelines. You know under our guidelines, we had to do our EMT. So we were -- I think there's been quite a few years that I've been an EMT, EMT-I.

KAREN: Oh, I didn't know you had to do one.

BARBARA: Oh, yeah. Uh-hum. It was part of the guidelines for our job.
So we did a lot of our training in Sitka. And then also up in Anchorage, which was -- was good because we had one whole floor there was the CHAP program, across from the old hospital.

KAREN: By the old Native Medical Center?

BARBARA: Uh-hum.

KAREN: Oh.

BARBARA: And also they had a trailer like that, we would be able to see patients, you know. It was part of our training.

And then we would see the patient and then go over things with the doctor. So he'd know that we were trying to do it right. So we did that. And then -- and I came here after --