It's when we got to Sham Shui Po
we got the beriberi.
Now we had the dry beriberi and
that's what they called electric feet.
I never had that, I had wet beriberi.
I’ll tell a little about dry beriberi first.
I had a lot of friends that had that dry
beriberi and these guys would get buckets,
I don't know where they'd get it
from some of them.
And we had water there and it was cold.
And outside the hut,
I can remember these guys sitting,
couple of them, as many feet we could
get in that bucket would get in it.
And they had some kind of thing to sit on.
They'd put their feet in there and
they'd let that cold water tap run
on there for these electric feet.
And these are men, and they're not babies,
and they sit there crying all night
with them electric feet and
electric shocks in that cold water.
The only way they'd get relief was
in that cold water.
Now the wet beriberi.
We had guys, the doctors apparently
don't know to this day how or
where it came from, because you'd weigh a
hundred pounds today and a week later
you'd weigh two hundred pounds.
It's amazing! I had it in both my legs,
both from here down, I had,
I was very lucky,
it's damaged both my knees, that's all.
To this very day, and this one here is really bad.
I had legs like two telephone poles.
You could stick your finger in there
about that deep and it would leave a hole in
your leg and you know about ten minutes
later it be back smooth again,
and you'd push it back in and
you had another hole in your leg.
That's wet beriberi.
But we had guys who had it in their head,
and their head would swell up all big like that,
their brains floating around there.
We had guys who got it in
their lungs and their chest.
Those guys that got in their chest,
they ain't here because they
drowned in it right away.
And then we had guys that got it in
their stomach and they tapped them and
drained it off. And one guy we had even
up in Japan, they tapped one guy.
We had like a wash basin, a large
wash basin about that big around and
about that deep.
They drained five wash basins
full of water out of his stomach,
but they saved the guys life,
he didn't die.
We had one guy, that guy was a WO2,
he got it in his testicles.
He blew up like a balloon,
only bigger then you’d blow up a balloon.
It’s unbelievable, your sac would swell
up that big around.
The guy couldn't stand up,
he couldn't hardly lay there with
his legs apart like that,
with his sac about that big around.
Unbelievable.