Sharing Mayo Clinic - April 2017 Archives

It was a quiet, rainy morning in 2002 at the Gift of Life Transplant House in Rochester, Minnesota. Kim DeBolt was staying at the hospitality house while recovering from a stem cell transplant at Mayo Clinic to treat acute myelogenous leukemia.

Today, 8-year-old Saydee is happy she can see well and ride in a car without feeling dizzy. At a visit with pediatric ophthalmologist Naomie Warner, D.O., in the Eye Care Center at Mayo Clinic Health System in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, last year, Saydee was diagnosed with lazy eye.

When Zulbiye Jorgensen, a project manager in Mayo Clinic's Center for Connected Care, began mentoring a team of Byron, Minnesota, high school girls in 2016 as part of the international Technovation Challenge, she asked the girls what careers they were considering. 

Steve Shank knows what it's like to face an uphill climb. Despite being legally blind and affected by albinism, he has been an avid bicyclist for years, competing in 100-mile rides on the rolling hills of Iowa.

Fritz Kruger of Hayward, Wisconsin, wondered how breathing pure oxygen while enclosed in a pressurized tube could heal his body. Fritz, 56, suffered from side effects of radiation therapy for prostate cancer when he was referred for hyperbaric oxygen therapy in fall 2016. 

To the delight of everyone who knows 3-year-old Rayna Speary, her head is perfectly round and smooth and average size. Given that the youngster was diagnosed and treated for an extremely rare brain tumor that caused her head to balloon in size as a 4-month-old, and that she underwent a dramatic surgery at Mayo Clinic to remove a substantial growth that occupied nearly half of her brain space, a perfect aesthetic of her head was not guaranteed.

Owning a successful financial planning firm for 20 years taught Terrance McMahon to plan for the future and for the unexpected. On May 26, 2016, all those years of planning became critical for Terrance. That day, heart palpitations sent him to a local hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he lived. Although he thought he was having a heart attack, he admits later that he hadn't felt well for the previous six months. "My eyes were bloodshot," Terrance says. "I was jaundiced, and I had bruises." Blood tests at the emergency room indicated Terrance had severely deteriorated liver function. "The doctor said I could die that night," Terrance says. "I went from being on top of the world to being told, 'You might not make it.'"

As a talented wedding photographer, the pain of cervical stenosis with a herniated disc left Darrell Deutz, age 59, searching for solutions. "I've photographed over a thousand weddings in my life," says Darrell, who owns his own studio based in Fargo, North Dakota. "A lot of photographers don't like the pressure. There is no second chance, so you have to be confident. You can't make any mistakes. I like the challenge."

The surgical teams assembled to operate on Mayo Clinic's most complex patients lately have begun to consist of more than living, breathing members. The new recruits are usually small enough to hold in your hand, and they don't say a word. But the information conveyed by these 3D anatomical printed models is helping surgeons plan and navigate the trickiest of procedures. In late 2016, Mayo Clinic thoracic surgeon Mark Allen, M.D. was part of a surgical team that used a 3D printed model to help them prepare to remove a rare, intrusive pancoast tumor. The tumor had grown in the chest of a patient, between his ribs and among the vessels just above his lungs.

As much as she’d like to forget Sept. 15, 2016, it's a day Julie George will never be able to erase from her memory. That day, the Eau Claire, Wisconsin, woman’s 21-year-old son, Dylan Walling, was riding his motorcycle on a highway en route to his grandmother’s house when the unthinkable occurred. A slow-moving manure spreader had caused a traffic backup. Dylan passed three cars and then collided with the farm vehicle as it began to turn left into a field. Although he was wearing a helmet, it wasn’t enough to protect him. The right side of Dylan’s body took the impact, leaving him seriously injured. His liver split in two. He had a kidney laceration, a head injury, a broken femur and forearm, an ankle injury and a collapsed lung. His foot was broken, his heel pad torn, and his toes were broken so badly they were almost severed.