Wow. What a day. That Mayo Clinic. Where to start….That place is unlike anything I have ever experienced. I felt like I was in a sci fi movie.
So to get you started, they send you a packet in the mail including an appointment card which gives you a time and a place to appear where you are given your itinerary for your visit. Tests are scheduled one after the next and are at appointed locations throughout the clinic which is comprised of a complex of ten or so buildings congregated together in downtown Rochester. To get from the hotel to the clinic you take one of the fifty or so shuttle buses that run during business hours. They start at one end of the strip beginning at St. Mary’s Hospital (where I will soon be residing) and pick up patients and their caregivers from all of the different places of lodging, and drop them off at the clinic and the two hospitals where Mayo admits patients. There is a surreal moment when the buses stop to take on several passengers wearing surgical masks at the Gift of Life Transplant House which houses the immuno-suppressed patients recovering from organ transplants. Then, the shuttle continues on to the Ronald McDonald House, and another hotel or two until it deposits the assortment of humanity assembled on the shuttle at the clinic motor court, a covered area in front of two impressive looking art deco buildings.
Once inside, I proceeded to my appointed destination. I picked up my schedule, and proceeded to my first appointment – a fasting blood test. I got into a line of about 20 people checking in at a desk. I quickly moved to the front of the line and was told to proceed through the doors behind the desk. Outside the doors behind the desk were about 5 rows of approximately 35 chairs each. There were 30 or so people interspersed in these chairs. I opened the desk to the lab expecting to find a small waiting area. Imagine my surprise when I found approximately 300 chairs lined in rows – almost all were filled with people. Technicians emerged one by one from behind little cloth curtains just like the Wizard of Oz calling patient after patient. I finally had my turn, and after 5 or so vials had been sucked out of my arm, I got a little gauze tourniquet like everyone else, and off I went to my next appointment – a chest x-ray.
The chest x-ray station was like a train depot. Patients were called in groups of three, and brought to little changing rooms looking much like a department store changing rooms – (just like Neiman Marcus in San Francisco except for the steel handicapped accessibility bars on the walls) darkly stained wood, clothes pegs, mirrors, and complete with a little locker key on the outside to turn and wear around your wrist so that your valuables and clothes stay protected while you are off being zapped. Once in the changing room I found a royal blue paper gown with 3 arm holes along with detailed instructions for putting on the gown. I was told to open the door my dressing room and to wait inside until they were ready for me and then they would come and get me. I was then escorted to the x-ray machine, zapped, and then allowed to move on to my next stop - the EKG station.
The EKG routine was much the same as the x-ray routine. The same dressing rooms and group protocol – just different dressing gowns – these were cotton and snapped in the back. The EKG had 12 leads and was done in a small room where once again there were numerous others just like the one I was in.
Apparently, the process ran so efficiently that I was done with my initial tests 2 ½ hours before my scheduled echocardiogram. Therefore, I went to the echo desk and asked if I could get moved up. They were able to shift my appointment to the echo lab at St. Mary’s hospital right away, so back I went onto the shuttle to St. Mary’s.
The echo lasted for about 2 ½ hours. I have never in my life had such a thorough echo, and I have had LOTS of echos. The techs reviewed all of my past echos and reports for 20 minutes or more to see what to focus on, and they pushed and pushed on my chest with various shapes and sizes of transducers. My poor chest was sore when they were done. But wait a minute, they weren’t really done. They took a break in the middle to “review the dailies” so to speak. Like a director supervising the final cut of a film, a supervising doctor came in to get some “reshoots” and make sure that they got all of the footage that they needed. Finally, they were done, and I was allowed to go home.
Since I was finished with my testing for the day, I went back downtown, had lunch at a nice Italian restaurant where I had a friendly chat with the wife of a cardiologist from the Midwest. Her husband is hospitalized with a crippling depression unresponsive to standard therapies. She brought him here to the emergency room and he has been hospitalized ever since.
Back at the hotel, I spoke with the mother of a 37 year old woman who is about to have her leg amputated. Next to her was a woman from San Francisco whose husband has some weird fungal infection usually found in gardeners which has taken over his body which was misdiagnosed and treated in San Fran. Everyone has an incredible story. Many if not most have been poorly treated or mistreated by some doctor at home. I am so so so so so so so so so so fortunate to have amazingly incredible doctors both in L.A. and here. I can’t tell you how great I feel to have been proactive in getting here to Mayo but along with the full support and blessing of both of my own doctors.
I am sitting here in the hotel lobby typing this and waiting for Vince to arrive. He should be here momentarily on the shuttle from Minneapolis. He left Jesse in Tulsa, and when I called a couple of hours ago, Jesse was happily watching the Sponge Bob movie with his cousins and eating ice cream. Well, I overheard a few outbursts, but I think Carol has it well under control.
Tomorrow, the test results, consults with doctors, and plans for the big show on Friday. To be continued………………
