Sharing Mayo Clinic - May 2009 Archives

I am not a Mayo Clinic employee, and I've never been a Mayo Clinic patient. But I am a heart attack survivor who last October travelled from the West Coast of Canada to Rochester to attend the annual WomenHeart Science and Leadership Symposium for Women With Heart Disease at Mayo Clinic - the first Canadian ever invited to attend! I discovered that this Symposium was part world-class cardiology education (with lectures from Mayo cardiologist like Dr. Sharonne Hayes and Dr. Rekha Mankad among others) and part community activism bootcamp! What we learned at Mayo Clinic was shocking, even to heart attack survivors:

Marlow and Frances Cowan, the Iowa couple whose piano duet in the atrium of Mayo Clinic’s Gonda building has been viewed more than 2 million ...

After spending most of the last decade in and out of physicians’ offices looking for solutions to her medical problems, Cindy Hansen turned to the ...

As Mayo Clinic employees, we are very fortunate to have a state-of-the-art fitness center on the Mayo Clinic Rochester campus. Called the Dan Abraham Healthy ...

Despite the fact that I have been a Mayo Clinic employee for almost 19 years, and have worked for over five of those years with ...

On Mother's Day, Jeanine Peterson told the story on her blog of the special gift she gave her mom, a Mayo Clinic patient. With her mom's permission, we share a portion of the story here:

As an 8-year-old girl from Michigan was headed into surgery for a heart transplant, she asked Mike Ackerman -- a pediatric cardiology fellow at Mayo who was part of her care team -- if she was going to live. Dr. Ackerman said, "Of course you're going to live, and I'm going to dance with you at your prom."  Ten years later -- on April 25, 2009 -- Dr. Ackerman flew to Michigan to surprise Stefani Pentiuk at her senior prom to fulfill a promise made years ago. I work at Mayo Clinic in our Public Affairs Department. Specifically, I work on our media team, helping reporters connect with physicians for interviews. I have had the pleasure of helping share Stefani's story.Update June 5, 2005: Dr. Ackerman, Stefani and her parents were featured live in the studio with Harry Smith on the CBS Early Show this morning. See the segment.

December 7, 1941 was labeled by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a "Day of Infamy" after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  For my wife, Anne, and me the date was April 13, 2009 when we heard from our family doctor that Anne had metastatic colon cancer.  The most unbelievable thing to us was that she had had no symptoms at all--no bowel changes, no bleeding, pain or weight loss.  What she did have was a "bump" in her upper abdomen which felt like a lipoma (small fatty tumor).  She noted it when we were away for a weekend with some friends. On the Monday we returned, she called our family doctor, who thought she may have a gallbladder problem.  He ordered an abdominal ultrasound which was done 3 days later.  This showed that she had several masses in her liver.  Since she was so asymptomatic, and they were so big, it was hard to imagine they were "bad" but an abdominal CT scan performed the next day (and reported to him on April 13th) showed our worst fears: colon cancer that involved lymph nodes and had metastasized to the liver. Our family doc, who is a friend and also goes to our church, immediately scheduled a colonoscopy, and a metastatic workup which included a CT scan of her lungs, brain, and a bone scan. He also called an oncologist here in Saginaw, another friend (I'm an orthopaedic surgeon, so I know most of the doctors in town), who insisted we go to the Mayo Clinic without doing anything here other than the scans.  Of course I knew about the Mayo Clinic, but other than referring the occasional patient here over the years, had never been to it.

National Nurses Week is May 6 through May 12. 2009.  The purpose of National Nurses Week is to raise awareness about the nursing profession and to ...

This submission came via email from P.J. Stietz, a Mayo Clinic employee: My husband and I just recently marked the sixth anniversary of the accident that paralyzed him. It was Mayo that came to his rescue, patched him up and got him ready to face the world again. We owe a great debt to the clinic. Not only did they provide superior care, but he was uninsured at the time and Mayo covered the majority of his hospital bill. Now that you have the Sharing Mayo Clinic blog, I thought it would be a wonderful way to share what Mayo has meant to us and to say "thanks." I hope you'll consider posting it. We're happy to be able to share P.J.'s submission, with Dan's consent: