KAREN:  What kind of training did they give you? 

LILLIAN:  Well, they told you what -- how to treat an ear infection, like, you know, children.  And how -- what you have to look for, what do you have to do. 

And, of course, you have to take their temperature, see, you know, how -- how high the temp was.  And the doctor told us that when they have a high temperature, that means they are fighting infection.  When they don't have a temp and they are very ill, you know they are not fighting the infection because they have no fever.  It's one thing I learned about.  You know.  Working with children. 

And we had a lot of otitis media there, in all the villages.  I think in -- they claim that even here in Anchorage, other children had it, too, so it's something that is sort of still common, I'm sure.  I don't find it as bad anymore as it used to be, seemed to me.  What I see among my great grandchildren and children. 
In those days, we used our antibiotics and we had to know that we're giving it for something that's -- that has to be treated and not something that is not -- like a bad case of cold or something, you -- you didn't use antibiotics every time they caught a cold.  You had to know what you were going to use it for. 
And how to distinguish the sounds in the lungs.  That was another thing we had to learn. 

It seemed like it was mostly with children that we had to work with, and of course, the elderly, too. 

And we always had -- got the radios, after we got the radios, it was easy to diagnose somebody and tell them what you thought was wrong, or -- and if you didn't, you told them what you found and they would -- they would tell you, and tell you what to treat them with and what to give them for discomfort.  Yeah.  That was a very good, I thought. 

KAREN:  What did you do before there were radios? 

LILLIAN:  We had -- I don't know.  By the time I became a health aide, we had radios, yeah.  We had the -- we didn't have our own radios in our clinic, but after that, we got these VHF and CBs that we could talk to Aniak and Bethel. 
And then when we got the phones, which made it good, but in -- in calling, we knew exactly when we had to call when we had cases.  We had to have a certain time of the day or -- or hour they would call us. 

They had to do it that way, call each village if they had any problems, if they needed to talk about.  And that made it good.  Because in that way, we learned -- we knew what we had to treat them with and stuff.  And what, if we had to send them out to the hospital. 

KAREN:  Did you -- were you able to listen on the radio?  Were you able to listen to the other villages? 

LILLIAN:  Uh-hum.  Yeah.  We heard them, they heard us and we heard them.  Giving their -- all their little accounts of their patients. 

And they would give the adult's age, male or female, and talk about whatever illness they had.  And we didn't give out names, you know, but we talked about the age.  Gave them the age and what was wrong and what symptoms they had. 

And of course, if they -- they knew a lot of them that I was -- that they -- they would ask how they were doing.  Lateral. 

And we had to keep charts, which was most important because by that, reading their charts, they know how often this illness would occur, like in otitis media and pneumonias and bronchitis and stuff like that. 

But after they got the phones, they still used the charts.  But it was much easier to call on the phone that it was on the radio.  Yeah.  And so...