Sharing Mayo Clinic - January 2010 Archives

Many people can relate to making some type of sacrifice for the one they love. For some, it’s a move far away from family and ...

For the seventh straight year, Fortune magazine has named Mayo Clinic to its "100 Best Companies to Work For" list. Mayo came in at #55, up ...

I wanted to share this story for other parents of teenagers with POTS. My daughter, Ariel, became sick in the middle of her junior year in high school. She was tired ALL the time — could barely function. She struggled through the school day, had to quit ballet and swim team. She was dizzy, faint, weak and exhausted. I took her to every doctor in our city, traveled to Riley Children's Hospital to a problem solving clinic and Chicago. No one knew what she had, but they all had an opinion. One doctor insisted I put her on antidepressants, that she needed to exercise more (need I mention she could not climb the stairs to her room), and probably had chronic fatigue and should take counseling to learn to live with a chronic disease. I knew this was not correct and continued to search for answers for my daughter. Here was an active, beautiful, honor student, who was being told to live with this handicap. They couldn't tell us what it was or how she got it, but she should deal with it.

This story was submitted by David Kelly from Saint Joseph, Mich. We’ve been a part of the Mayo Experience since 1998. Originally we began our treatment in a Chicago hospital. It was there that our two-year-old daughter, Hannah, had her first biopsy to determine what was causing a lump just below her right wrist. I’ll never forget that day after surgery when the doctor came out and told us, “I’ve done many biopsies similar to this one, and it appears that Hannah has cancer. The pathologist still needs to give his final report though.” Over the course of a week and a half no clear results were given to us, other than we would know as soon as they did. The doctors were even discussing sending out the biopsy slides for further study to another pathologist. The waiting game is bad enough when you’re in line for a ride at Disney World, but when you’re waiting to hear news on whether or not your child has cancer, it’s beyond description. We had been put through the emotional ringer and weren’t sure that Chicago was the place for us. “Get yourself to Mayo,” urged a dear friend of mine. Those four words now mean the world to my family and me. Once there, we were thrilled to discover — within only a day — that it was a tumor known as fibromatosis, a soft tissue tumor that shows no sign of malignant features, and that might eventually dissipate with age.

Sam Buchl and Darin Steffl both enjoyed volunteering in the Mayo Clinic Blood Donor Center during their senior year of high school. As volunteers in ...

Every six minutes, a patient at Mayo Clinic receives a transfusion of blood or blood products. There’s an ongoing and never-ending need for blood donors ...