The Holiday, the Clammy Damps, and Japlish

From the tabletop diary:
11-26-09 Thurs. (Thanksgiving day for the normal folks)
Oh boy ~ our tails are draggin', as expected. I was looking forward to having tomorrow off but Mary noticed a black spot on the top of my left ear last Sunday while giving me a haircut. The soonest appointment I could get at Doc Weispfenning's was tomorrow @ 13:00.
Dialysis today; ear surgery tomorrow and dialysis all day Saturday.
Next week, surgery on Thurs., Dec. 3rd to install fistula & peritoneal catheter except this week, NW Kidney Center changed my dialysis days to Tues., Thurs., and Saturday – Thursday being the same day I'll be in surgery.
All these appointment are just turning into a train wreck worthy of a Charlie Chaplin movie.
LATER: We went in at 10:30 this morning which would make me think we would get off earlier but some how we still got home around dark. Actually the days are continuing to get shorter and the kidney center had a small army of patients to treat today so disconnecting took a while.
About 12:55 my nurse, Yeong (pronounced “young,” a nice Korean girl), was cleaning the tunnel catheter and changed the dressing when I suddenly went into a low blood pressure incident that turned me cold, sweaty and in danger of passing out. Don't know what happened but it was real unpleasant and took about 15 minutes to recover from after they turned the blood pump down from its usual speed of 300 to about 150. After I came around, I slept the rest of the day, went home and felt wasted until I finally gave up and hit the sack around 9:00 p.m.
11-27-09, Friday
The head floor nurse is Jean, a third-generation Japanese-American woman who is working to re-learn her ancestral language so we have fun practicing what little Japanese we both know on each other. I warned her that my memory of the language goes back to the time we lived on Kyushu as part of the post-war occupation forces. As such, the language I learned was a mixture of pidgin Japanese-English which evolved at that time and in that place. Since it was a tentative combination of two languages developed in a first-contact situation, I speculated that it was probably dead and gone by now but Jean's eyes brightened up and she said, “Oh no – it's still in use! It's called 'Japlish!'”
In some cases words had to be blended to describe things the Japanese had never seen before and therefore had no words for them. Since they used chopsticks there was no word for “knife” or “fork” and the words “ni-fu” and “forku” evolved. Likewise the word for milk became “miruku” in Japlish because the Japanese had no letter “L” in their language and couldn't pronounce it except as an “R” sound.
One phrase Jean had never heard a Japanese use was, “Ah, so,” which has become a rather contemptible American stereotypical phrase and Jean was equally contemptuous and offended by its use, as it tended to be racially demeaning.
I had heard the phrase all my life. It was indeed brought back to the U.S. By the troops in the Pacific theater – but only as a corruption of a phrase I heard as a child as a form of Japlish, perhaps. It was: “Hai, so desuka. Wakarimas.” I took it to mean, “Yes, I see. I understand.” It was an American imitation of a phrase they couldn't fully pronounce and so it became an abbreviation.`