[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

Hello! Another super-long Flying Squid post from my visit to the Mayo Clinic here in Rochester, Minnesota. I'd link to the background, but there's been too many (requested) update posts at this point. Sorry for anyone new to this who actually reads to the end.

I'm sure they're super busy considering the number of patients, but I haven't heard from the gastroenterology department in a couple of days despite calling over there. The Mayo clinic doesn't operate on the weekends, so I'm just in a holding pattern, which is excruciating. But it has given me time to make some observations:

• Outside of medical offices and waiting areas, being at Mayo feels like being in a combination of an art museum and an airport. I don't mean like an airport with a lot of art in it either, I mean like there are areas that feel like you're in an airport based on the people traffic and the seating and the noise and so on and then there are other areas where you're in a little side room looking at hand-blown glass sculptures while you listen to a woman playing a grand piano outside of it. And then you go into an exam room and it's like a normal such place except with nicer-looking equipment.

• Rochester's population is about 120,000 people, but between the Mayo Clinic and the hotels next to the Mayo Clinic, the downtown is full of skyscrapers, making it look like a massive city... until you leave the downtown area at which point it's a standard town.

• And to cement in that point, outside of downtown, almost everything commercial is along the same road or at least very close to it.

• According to the demographics I looked up, Rochester is 6% Latino, and yet almost the entire international foods aisle of the Walmart grocery area plus multiple other displays throughout that part of the store are dedicated to Mexican food. Not a complaint, or criticism, just weird that they're devoting so much space to such a small population segment, especially considering who knows how many of them aren't of Mexican heritage or from Mexico. I'm happy that Mexicans or people of Mexican heritage get to have a lot of comfort food though, since they may not be here for pleasant reasons. Anything to make any patients at Mayo more comfortable is a good thing.

• The Goodwill is full of brand new items. I mean brand new. We didn’t look at most of the clothes (although everything on the socks display was brand new) but like everything in the garden aisle was new, with multiple copies of the same products to buy. In the electronics area there were 10-15 HDMI cables still in their plastic clamshells amongst other things. I know there are a lot of doctors here, but they are just donating new items in bulk? (It did still have the standard musty Goodwill smell.)

• For some reason, there are two malls here. One is absolutely massive. Again, something you would expect in a much larger municipality.

• There's also an absolutely massive pawn shop, I guess because people need to pawn stuff to pay their medical bills?

• Despite having a pretty much captive audience of people who are either Mayo patients or their caregivers, there is essentially nothing to do here in terms of entertainment. One of the hotels has a comedy club, there's a few bars, some outside stuff that is not doable when it's this cold and that's about it. The county museum doesn't even open until next week. You would think this would be the perfect place to open up all sorts of entertainment venues. The closest city is Minneapolis and it's an 80-minute drive. Rochester isn't even on an interstate. And, of course, on top of that, there's the huge number of Mayo employees who are also stuck here. I don't get it. I would have expected the greater Rochester area to be a bunch of antique shops, tourist traps and "old timey" stores. Nope.

• There is a weird as hell fast food place here called Mochinut where they sell "donut" rings made out of mochi balls and also sell "rice hot dogs" covered in various shells. I'd be willing to try it if I was eating, but I've never heard of anything like it before.

Also, were you hoping for more stories about my crazy mother? Here you go:

• What she is and is not willing to pay for is weird as hell. She paid for this AirBnB, which I am grateful for, and she said she wanted to help with our medical debts, which I am super grateful for. On the other hand, she hasn't offered to pay for gas, she has not offered to pay for the occasional chai latte I get for myself, and outright said, "you'll have to pay for it yourself" when I picked up a replacement charge cable for my phone. And yet she happily bought me a not especially inexpensive Mexican mango drink in the aforementioned huge Mexican foods section at Walmart that looked good to me. I'm willing to pay for all of it myself if necessary, it's not that, I just totally don't understand what she is and is not willing to pay for. It feels like it's really random.

• The other day, she came into my room and said, "I wonder where the behavioral unit is?" I said I didn't know and that she should Google it. She said, "don't you have a map?" Yes. It's called Google Maps. This is 2024.

• Because the neurologist said he was leaning on the issue being behavioral, my mother (at least for a while, we think she's come around a little) decided that it is definitely behavioral and that we should just leave and find a behavioral therapist in Indiana. However, last night she said, "do you think it could be related to smell since you're smell-sensitive?" Then went back to it being behavioral for sure.

• Later, she decided to look up Mayo Clinic behavioral doctors and somehow got onto their clinic network page and started saying things like, "where the hell is Yuma? Is it close to Rochester?" This was after I told her that the Mayo Clinic's network is nationwide.

• Thank god my wife said I should Facetime her when we get in to see a doctor after we didn't think to do it the first time because I didn't realize just how bad her hearing and memory problems are. She just basically makes up things she decided she's heard the doctors say. This second time, I've had my wife to back me up on it.

• She told me yesterday the she was very disappointed with the Mayo system (due to the wait) and that she expected what would happen was I would get into an exam room and there would be a whole group of doctors there with different specialties who would all check me out at the same time. She keeps saying, "this is just like a regular hospital!" And I tell her, "yes, except that it has some of the best doctors in the country!" As if that wasn't a huge difference.

• Even though she has been told both by me and by Mayo employees that if they were going to contact me through the patient portal, I would get an email and even possibly a text message, she told me to check the portal every couple of hours on Thursday and Friday. On top of that, she wanted us to go over there yesterday because she seemed to think we could harass the admissions lady into getting the doctor to see us.

• Every so often, she has had to be talked down from the idea that the gastro department will never call us back, but then a few minutes ago, she told me she was going to contact the AirBnB people to see if it would be possible for us to leave next weekend instead of Wednesday. I believe what finally convinced her that I was going to stay as long as possible whether she wanted to be here or not was that my wife told her last night that if she took the train home to Indiana this weekend, my wife would drive an hour and a half from Terre Haute to pick her up in Indianapolis, drive an hour and a half down to Bloomington where she lives to drop her off and drive the 80 minutes back to our home in Terre Haute and I would just check into the cheapest motel. It really shouldn't have taken her almost a week to realize that I'm staying until I get answers or I absolutely have to leave.

Finally...

• This morning, she said to me, "I guess we can relax for the weekend." I don't think that's something she's capable of. We can't think of anything better to do on Easter Sunday here than go buy a jigsaw puzzle today for us to do tomorrow. I hope it doesn't end up in one of us killing the other over a missing piece. There are board games here, but the only one that looks good to her is Scrabble, and she is an evil Scrabble player who always wins through placing tiles in the most dickish ways she can, and the only one that looks good to me is Boggle and I am, not to toot my own horn, an amazingly good Boggle player who even kicked her ass in it when I was a teenager, so there wouldn't be a point.

End of super long post.

Can you tell I'm bored yet?