On the brief visit we just had to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, we were kept pretty busy rushing between appointments and testing at the clinic. On Tuesday afternoon, however, we did get a chance to visit with some of the other guests in the Gift of Life Transplant House. Most of the stories have happy endings. Many of the patients are there for a stem cell transplant, using their own stem cells, and the history of success is very high. Others, though, for various reasons, cannot use their own stem cells and must rely on a donor. Their success rate is not so high, and on Tuesday one resident got the news "We're sorry, your body is rejecting the donor's marrow. We've done all we can do, and there's nothing left to try," and his reply was, "I just want to go home." We visited with his sister/caregiver that afternoon.
And then, there are the situations where even the happy story is integral with a tragedy. Some of the patients are receiving transplants of heart, lung or liver, and there is the awareness that although they are alive and have survived the transplant process, it was at the cost of some other person's life. Sometimes, the organ recipient will read or hear in the news about a specific young individual's life cut tragically short by an accident, and know they are alive because that youngster has died. They share the emotional mixture of joy and sadness, and gratitude and guilt.
Late Tuesday afternoon, we had to run back to the Mayo Clinic, then wandered the shops of the downtown area after dark. The picture to the right is of Carol at our dinner in a well-recommended Italian Restaurant named Victoria's. That's an odd name for an Italian Restaurant, but the food and the atmosphere were superb!
