Sharing Mayo Clinic - July 2011 Archives

Dr. Renee Caswell, an anesthesiologist and Director for the anesthesiology residency program at Mayo Clinic in Arizona, shares a passion not only for medicine and education but also for the creative art of quilting. From July through September, Dr. Caswell’s work will be showcased as part of the Humanities in Medicine Loaned Artwork Program in the Pharmacy Gallery on the first floor of the Mayo Clinic Building. Her exhibit will feature multiple quilts of different scales, styles, and colors.

Eight years ago, Jill Morton was dying. A family history of kidney disease had finally caught up with her. Her kidneys were failing, and her body was shutting down. "I was really afraid," she says. For two long years, Morton, of Boca Raton, Fla., lived with that fear -- her name on the transplant list and a beeper always at hand -- waiting for that moment when a match might suddenly become available.

For weeks, Amy Brase had brushed off nagging chest pain. “It just didn’t seem like an emergency,” says Brase, a 36-year-old writer and mother of three from Oronoco, Minn. But after reading an article on heart attack symptoms in women, her husband, Adam, began doing a bit of nagging himself. “Adam e-mailed me part of the article he’d read and asked if I’d called the doctor yet,” says Brase. “I was supposed to leave for Georgia the next day, and he urged me to see a doctor before my flight.”

Howard Snitzer will be the first to tell you he’s a lucky man. “I just wish I’d won the lottery instead,” he says, jokingly. But Snitzer knows his good fortune netted him something much more valuable: his life. Snitzer, a 54-year-old chef, miraculously survived a cardiac arrest thanks to a flawless and unrelenting response from nearly two dozen emergency personnel, including many volunteer first responders. The group took turns performing CPR on Snitzer for 96 minutes, more than 30 minutes longer than previously documented out-of-hospital cardiac arrest durations. Snitzer’s story begins one cold evening in January, when he headed to Don’s Foods in rural Goodhue, Minn., to buy a tank of propane for his grill. But Snitzer never made it inside. Instead, he experienced cardiac arrest and fell to the ground on the sidewalk just outside the store.

The giant couldn’t crush Ron Woodside’s spirit. The giant — an EF4 tornado that dropped from the sky on June 17, 2010 — destroyed his home and took away the irreplaceable — his wife of 18 years. But Woodside, 77, has survived and thrived. Ron and Kathy Woodside lived in rural Albert Lea, Minn., and were attuned to the weather that day — which set a new Minnesota record with 48 tornadoes. Woodside recalls seeing an approaching rain cloud and hearing the rain begin. Within moments, the walls of their home were quivering. The home blew apart and the couple was at the mercy of the twister, with wind speeds around 174 mph. “I remember bouncing along, like a giant was hammering me into the ground,” says Woodside. His wife, Kathy, did not survive.

A momentous occasion occurred recently at Mayo Clinic in Florida when a bone marrow transplant patient, Kongphaly Aphayasane, was awarded United States citizenship in her ...

Just over two years ago, Marlow Cowan and his wife Frances became Internet sensations when a video of their piano duet at Mayo Clinic went ...