Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hi, everyone. This is Dawn Clem, and you are on my podcast, Milkweed and monarchs.
[00:00:07] It occurred to me that I did tell you about the Navy, but only the boot camp part, and I was actually in there for, you know, four years. So I want to share with you a story about Lieutenant Commander Hicks. It's not actually a story. It was an ongoing event, because if it wasn't for her, I don't think I would have ever gotten situated in the Navy in a good way.
[00:00:37] So after boot camp, I told you, I went to Great Lakes, which was in Illinois, and I was there for ten weeks. So I went to boot camp from January 6 to March 6, and then I went to hospital Corpsman training from March 10, I think, and for five weeks. So I got out, and in May, I was going to be going to my permanent duty station.
[00:01:16] So when you get out of your associated training, so, hospital core school, it was called, you're allowed to pick three duty stations that you might want to experience.
[00:01:31] So it's your first choice, your second choice, and your third choice. That's how they have it set up. So for my first choice, I picked Bethesda, Maryland.
[00:01:40] They had an advanced technical training program there for EEG technicians, which is brain waves for the brain patients. So, as you can see, I was interested in neurology way back. It started a long time ago, so I applied for that as my first duty station. And the second one, I picked Norfolk, Virginia, because that was all on the east coast, wouldn't be too far from Michigan.
[00:02:12] And as a long shot, my third choice would, was San Diego. Everybody told me, of course, when I'm picking my duty stations, oh, you never get the third choice. You always get your first or second choice. No, that's not how it went for me, naturally. Gotta be different. Dawn.
[00:02:32] The EEG program had been closed, so Bethesda, Maryland, was out completely, and that left Norfolk, San Diego. And when I got my orders, my orders were to San Diego.
[00:02:47] I was so surprised. I was really actually in a state of shock. And that was a long way for a 19 year old to go, to be away from all your family and friends. I mean, that was a big change for me.
[00:03:04] So I tell my mom about it, my mom, I think she was happy in some points and sad in other points, because they wanted to see me more often than they knew they were going to see me. If I moved to California, the day came for me to fly to San Diego, and of course, the military had gotten me a red eye flight.
[00:03:31] Now, it was during the time where you didn't have rolling luggage.
[00:03:36] And you were hauling your suitcase around the airport. There weren't the fast walkers, either. There was not a lot of help. I suppose I could have got a wheelchair, now that I look back on it, but I was completely inexperienced. So this was the second time I had flown. The first time was from Michigan to boot camp in Orlando. My parents brought me home. I was stationed in Great Lakes. And I would take the train back and forth from Chicago to Jackson, Michigan, and my parents would pick me up. So I never had to fly that whole entire time. So I'd really only flown to Orlando once. And now here I am flying to San Diego in California by myself on a red eye flight. So I boarded the plane at 1130. I had one huge, giant suitcase. It had all my uniforms in there that you get all your uniforms when you're in boot camp that go with you. So I had all my uniforms, and then I had all my other clothes that I had to wear on my days off. And the suitcase was jam packed, and I could barely haul that thing around. So I get to the airport, and my dad's gonna help me at least get to my terminal. And we get up there. I mean, even he was having a hard time carrying that big old suitcase. And we get up there, and my parents and I were all like, oh, boy, this is a big move for you, you know, trying to hold the tears back. But got on the plane at midnight. I think we left at 12:30 a.m.
[00:05:29] And I arrived in San Diego somewhere around. It's a five hour flight, but it's 2 hours of time change in there. So it was three. Would have been 330 in the morning in Michigan. And I think it ended up to be 1230 again, San Diego. So it was like time was standing still.
[00:05:56] And I get my suitcase off the plane. That was a miracle in and of itself. And I get down to the area where I'm going out, and I'm like, I have no idea what I'm. I had no clue. What am I gonna do here, right? No clue. Nobody's there to help you. You are just on your own. So they had given me my orders. So I pulled the orders out of my purse. And at that time, I walked out of the front of the airport, and there were so many taxis. That's all I remember. There were, like 20 taxis waiting there. And I thought to myself, okay, this wasn't their first rodeo, was it? They're probably so used to people coming in and out because of the military. And. And so they were waiting.
[00:06:53] So the first taxi guy comes right up to me and says, oh, can I help you? Can I help you? Where are you going? Where you going? I said, I'm going to. You know, I hand him my papers, and they had assigned me. They had actually gotten me a hotel room for the night. And I was going to the hotel, and then I would report the next day to Balboa Naval Hospital, says, I got you. I'm going to take you right to the hotel. So he takes me to the hotel. I go upstairs, I get in the hotel, get changed into my pajamas, brush my teeth, and basically I pass out. I am so tired.
[00:07:32] So the next day comes and I think I got up about 09:00 and I hurried up and got dressed, brushed my teeth, got my suitcase all organized, went up, you know, my bill was all set.
[00:07:47] And then get outside. And again, there's taxis at the hotel. And he takes me right over to Balboa Naval Hospital. So by now I'm getting there. It's about 10:00 in the morning by the time I had slept and gotten ready and gotten organized.
[00:08:04] And I see on my orders that I'm supposed to report to the fifth floor of the hospital to Lieutenant Commander Hicks. I got this big, huge suitcase I'm hauling around still.
[00:08:19] I get in the elevator with it. I get up to the fifth floor and I get to her. I'm looking around and I see the office that says Lieutenant commander Hicks. And I go to the door with my suitcase, and I knock on the door, and out comes this woman. I mean, to me, she was so tall. She was probably like 511, maybe even 6ft tall. She was a large woman, bright blonde hair, big round face. And she opens the door and she's looking at me.
[00:08:59] And I said, I'm reporting for duty. She says, well, who are you? And I said, I'm hn Farrow. So hospital corpsman Farrow. And she says to me, where the heck have you been? I go, what do you mean, where have I been? I've been sleeping. I didn't get here till after midnight last night. I was sleeping in the hotel. She said, you were supposed to be here at 730. Go 730. I wouldn't have had any sleep. She's looking at me.
[00:09:29] Well, in her office with her was an assistant and his name was Terry. I came to know that later. She turns and looks at Terry and she says to him, this one's gonna be a piece of work. And that was the start of my relationship. With Lieutenant Commander Hicks.
[00:09:49] She says, okay, terry's gonna take you over to the barracks. We're gonna get you situated.
[00:09:56] First. He's gonna take you on a tour of the hospital so you can see where you're gonna work, and you'll know the units that I'm over. And then if you have any questions, you can just contact Terry, and then we'll get you moving forward. So I'm like, okay, sounds good. So he.
[00:10:16] We left my suitcase in the office, and then he took me out to the floors. So there were two adjoining units in the hospital, five a and five b. And then upstairs was six a and six b. Five a and five b were open bed wards. And I believe there were 40 patients in there. So ten patients on or 20 patients on port side and 20 patients on starboard side.
[00:10:50] Ten beds in a row facing each other on one side, and then there's a wall in between, and then ten beds facing each other on the other side. And right is starboard and left is port. So that's Navy language. So he walks me around the units, and I am completely petrified. I'm not gonna lie. There's a bunch of patients just lying in bed, iv poles everywhere, equipment. I'm thinking, oh, my God, I just had ten weeks of training. I don't know anything. You know, it was. I was terrified. There's no other way to put it.
[00:11:33] So he shows me around five b, then he takes me over to five a. Complete mirror image of five b. They were set up exactly the same. We take the elevator up to the 6th floor, and these are all rooms. So it's semi private rooms. Or they had one room, I think, that had four bedrooms, beds in a ward for each side, six a and six b.
[00:12:04] And he walked me around those units and showed me everything. It didn't seem as terrifying, and I think it's because it wasn't an open bay like that.
[00:12:14] But the people that were admitted on the fifth floor were all active duty men.
[00:12:24] And the people that were admitted on the 6th floor were usually either officers or officers family members, enlisted family members. So there were female patients on the 6th floor, none on the fifth floor.
[00:12:45] I quickly found out that I was going to be the only female corpsman that was actually on the five b side. So I worked on five Bravo and I was the only female corpsman. We had nurses that. And all of them were female except for. We had one male nurse, but all the corpsmen were men except for me. I was the only female. And all the patients were mentioned active duty men. And they, they were in ranges, probably age ranges from 20 all the way up to, like, 60 for patients with varying medical problems.
[00:13:32] So he showed me around there, and then he said, this is where you're going to be working, and we'll get a work schedule for you. But now I'm just going to take you over to the barracks because you've had a long journey, a long day already, and let's just get you set up in your room, and we'll see you back here tomorrow. So we go back to Lieutenant commander Hicks office with a wheelchair, and he puts my luggage in the wheelchair, and we wheel it over to the barracks. The barracks is really nothing more than a dormitory if you were going to college, that's all it was. And we get to the front desk and he said, I'm here with Hn Farrow. I want to get her checked. And she's going to be starting to work at Balboa. And they go, we don't have any empty rooms. He goes, what? She goes, no, we don't have any empty rooms. He goes, well, where is she going to sleep? They said she can sleep in the basement. We're hoping that there's going to be some people checking out that are finishing up their time and their tour of duty within the next week or so. So she can sleep in the basement for now. We have bedside set up down there as a temporary place for her to go. And there's a bathroom down there, too, so she should be fine. I'm thinking, what the heck is going on here? As you can well imagine.
[00:14:57] So he goes over to the elevator and we push basement, and down we go. And sure enough, we're in this dungeon. And that is the way I'm going to define it from this, this minute forward, because that's what it was. It was a old dungeon basement, the kind where the windows are way up in the air. I couldn't look out a window if I wanted to. Even if I stood on the bed, I couldn't see out that window, okay? So there were very few windows. It was dark, it was dank, and it was filled with old hospital equipment that they either didn't use anymore or were waiting to get rid of or they didn't, you didn't need on regular basis. I'm like, me and the equipment are down here in a metal bed in a creepy old basement dungeon.
[00:15:49] And he's like, don, it's not going to be for long.
[00:15:53] You're going to be fine. He had shown me on the way over where the cafeteria was. So he says, you can go for dinner over at the cafeteria in the hospital and then just come back here. You should be fine. I'm thinking the whole time, what the heck did I get myself into?
[00:16:13] Really? Please, Lord.
[00:16:17] So I stayed down there that night, and I'm kind of a history buff anyway, so I spent a lot of time just looking at the old equipment, checking it all out. They had an old weight machine, and not for lifting weights, but one of those old machines that when you turn it on and you put a wide belt around your behind and it's like in a u shape, and then you turn it on and it just jiggles you, I'm like, oh, that's a good way to lose weight. Like, I needed to at that time, I could use one now, but at that time I did not need one. So I would just stand there for like 45 minutes with that thing going, looking around, thinking to myself, what am I doing here? I checked out all the equipment and it started to get dark, and it was so spooky down there. And I just got in the bed. I remember this so vividly. And I pulled the covers over my head. I had an alarm clock, and I had it all set and ready to go. The bathroom was so old and decrepit. I mean, the bathroom looked like something from the 1930s or forties. It was so bad and it was disgusting. But it was a bathroom. I could brush my teeth. There was a shower in there. I had shower shoes or flip flops back then. That's what they always wanted you to wear in boot camp, so you had those with you. So I'm like, oh, I can get through it. And it had a plug for my hairdryer, so I could at least get my hair all set up.
[00:17:55] So the next day I get all ready, you know, ready to go, come out, go eat breakfast, go up to the fifth floor. Terry's waiting for me on five b.
[00:18:11] He takes me around and he introduces me to everyone and he says, don's going to be your corpsman here. All the nurses were really great, and the senior corpsman, who's the head corpsman was wonderful, too. His name was Gary. And they all wanted to make sure that I felt like I fit in, which I fit in about like, nothing really. I just did not feel like I belonged there at all. It was so uncomfortable for me, but nonetheless, I was going to learn a lot. So then he also gave me my schedule and how it is in the military. When you were a corpsman back then is you would work two weeks of days, two weeks of evenings, two weeks of nights, and then you'd start all over again. I felt like you never had a minute of sleep because you were still trying to adjust from the last shift that you had been on last week. So it really was not a good setup, I didn't think.
[00:19:16] But nonetheless, what I did learn while I was working there was incredible. So I told you, we had that open bay wart. A lot of times the male patients might come in with respiratory, like, pneumonia. They would come in with GI upset, some kind of infection in their leg, maybe a cellulitis or something. Nothing that I knew anything about at that time. But it was good because, really, the corpsman did all of the treatments, every single thing. So if you were a patient and I was working the night shift, I would draw everybody's labs. If you needed labs during the day, and I was the corpsman, I would draw all the labs. We didn't have lobotomists. The corpsman did everything.
[00:20:07] If you needed respiratory breathing treatments, I would do the respiratory breathing treatments. If you needed an EKG, I did the ekgs. Everything that you needed done, we basically did. We spun our own urines, so we would know if you had an infection, and we spun our own labs for your hematocrit, so we would know if you were having a GI bleed. So we did all of that, and we would order x rays. We did. It was really. You did everything? Everything. We had the nurses there, and the nurses were over us, but really, their job was to make sure that they were getting the proper orders from the physicians so that we could. That would direct our care as to what the patient needed. I'll never forget one time, I bet we had, like, eight or nine patients that all came in with pneumonia, and they were just on one side of the unit, and so I would just start with one and work my way, all the way down. First, I give them all their breathing treatment, then I go back, and then I'd do chest percussion on their back, so I'm kind of beating on their back to move the secretions around and help them cough it up. And then I would come back and I'd give them their iv antibiotics or their pills. So it was like a full service thing. It was so funny to me, but I. I think I turned out to be a fantastic nurse because of the training I got as a corpsman, I never, ever. I mean, you didn't. You could not be afraid. There was no chance to be afraid of anything. You were gonna do it. That was your job, and that's the way it goes. So I learned an incredible amount.
[00:22:05] So I was there probably about the first.
[00:22:10] Yeah, because I think I started to go into. I started out. They let me be on days for a month to start out with, and the month is going by, and I'm not getting a room in the barracks. So I'm like, this, getting old. I gotta take care of this. I don't want to be down here anymore. I'm not too happy about it. The only good thing that happened is that two other people joined me, Cindy and Susan. And neither one of them were very happy about it either. Cindy was assigned to five a, and Susan was assigned to six a. So we were all working in the same medical area, and we were all going to the barracks, or the basement of the barracks, the dungeon, to sleep at night, or when our shift was off.
[00:23:04] So they started complaining to me, what the heck are we gonna do? This is not right. We need to get the heck out of here. I'm like, yeah, we really do. And then to make matters worse, the cockroaches showed up. I've never seen cockroaches before. We have cockroaches in Michigan, and all of a sudden, these cockroaches, oh, God, they were so nasty. And they were big, too. They weren't little, skinny, tiny things. They were big, fat things. Those girls would stand up on their beds, and of course me, I'm running around trying to swat them. It was awful.
[00:23:42] They were like, you got to take care of this, dawn. I'm like, yeah, I really do. So I took it upon myself the next day to make my way back up to Lieutenant Commander Hicks office. So I knock on the door, and she comes to the door, she's looking down at me, and she's like, well, Don, how are you doing? What can I do for you? How's everything going? I go, not so great, Lieutenant Commander Hicks. I'm still living in the basement. I might have two roommates, but none of us really like it down there. And now there's cockroaches. So how long do you think we're gonna have to put up with this? And she's like, oh, my God. I wish you could just see the look on her face when she. First of all, she was horrified over the cockroaches. But second of all, she was cracking up, because who is this person that's confronting a lieutenant commander that's enlisted, right? So she turns and looks at Terry, and she's like, what the heck is going on? He said, I don't know. I thought they would have been out by now. I never really checked on it, and this is the first time I'm hearing anything. She says, don, go back to the dungeon today, and then I want you to come back here tomorrow after your shift, and we're gonna talk. So I'm like, okay, that sounds great.
[00:25:05] So the next day, I did my shift. I get done. I go up to see her. She was waiting for me and Terry, too, and she said, we are going to move you into your own apartment. I said, what? She said, yes. You're going to go to off base housing. You're not going to live on the base. I got. It's not your fault that we don't have room in the barracks and we need to take care of our people. So I have talked to the powers that be, and the USO is going to pay for you your first month and your last month rent, plus six months of rental free. If you want to come back to the barracks after that, that's perfectly fine. If you want to stay in the housing, then you will assume the rent.
[00:25:54] And she said, we went through the paper today because, of course, that was when you had to go through the want, not the want ads, but the classifieds to look for apartments. And a lot of buildings, too. I saw when terry and I were driving around, actually had, for rents, signs out in front of the buildings. They don't do so much of that anymore. And there's no classified like that room for rent.
[00:26:22] So he said, we went through them already today, dawn, and we've picked out three, four of them that are kind of close to the hospital because we know you don't have transportation and you're going to have to take the bus. Another new thing for me, I've never been on public transportation like that before in my entire life from a small town, you know? So this was like, whoa, first I'm getting an apartment, then I'm gonna have to take a bus. But he drove me around. He had four picked out. We looked at three of them, and the third one I really, really loved. It was so cute. It was a freestanding bungalow. There were like three of them in a row. And then there was one behind us with two apartments in the upper part of the building. The bottom part was like a garage. So I said, okay, I like this one. He goes, you know what? I like this one for you, too. It had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room area, and had a little front porch. Plenty of storage, lots of closets. And it was kind of like in a garden setting. It was really, really cute. I liked it. And he said, I think this is good. It's not far from the bus, so I had to just walk to the corner, and it was like a couple of houses away. And the bus stop was right there. And I could take the bus stop all the way up to the end of the road to a t, and then there I would transfer to a different bus that drove past the zoo, past Balboa park, and then the hospital was across the street from Balboa park. And it would drop me right off at the hospital.
[00:28:09] So we thought, yeah, this is going to work out good. You know, I can. I can handle this. I was kind of excited about it. He said, you're going to take the other two with you. They're going to come with you. They didn't come with me to look at the apartment. She just let me do it. So I went back and. And I told Cindy and Susan, we're gonna move out. We're gonna move into this apartment. The USO was paying for it. I told them everything that was going on, and I said, so as soon as they make the arrangements, we'll pack up and we'll move over there. So both of them were in, and I was very grateful to lieutenant Commander Hicks for helping me out.
[00:28:58] This is the conclusion to the first part of the story. It's going to be a couple more episodes, so please hang in there with me. It's worth listening to.
[00:29:13] If you have a story you want to share with me, you can go through my website, milkmon.com. Milkmon.com. All one word. And there's a place for you to click on the link. And you can share your information with me, or you can call me directly. My phone number is listed on there as well. I would love to hear from any one of you. It would be great to get some other stories on here, although I'm not disappointed to share my stories and I'm getting some good feedback. So I appreciate all of you who listen.
[00:29:50] Take care, and I'll see you for the next episode.
