Hello Mayo Clinic,
So nice to meet you.
SINCERELY yours,
A very anxious and hopeful patient.
The capacity and shear size of this academic medical center easily breathed new life into my fatigued body. Mayo Clinic was welcoming from DAY 1. If I could summarize the staff in one word. It’d be COMPASSIONATE.
I didn’t feel alienated there. I felt believed. I felt for the first time in a long time a sense of normalcy. I didn’t feel like a subject but rather a possibility for healing.
This time around, the tests were hands on. I was riding bikes, running on treadmills, I had a heart rate monitor attached to my hip for all of it, I did pulmonary function testing and the most interesting one of all was the Tilt Table test.
THAT test, the tilt table…where you can’t help but think of Jesus (google tilt table and you’ll know why) solely gave me my answers I had long been waiting for.
Ding ding ding.
We have a POTS patient.
—
That office visit was one of the best conversations I have had with another human being in my lifetime to date.
My doctor started out our visit by saying, “I know what you have Kaitlin.” (ew, full name).
I nearly fell of my seat…
He proceeded by saying, “but before I tell you I need to ask you a few more questions.”
I COULD HAVE STRANGLED THE MAN.
I KNEW he had the answers for me in his tidy manila folder.
Yet he questioned “why I wanted to heal?” “How the past five months had been for me?”.
I kept the answers short. “because I want to get back to my life” “it’s been a big change, I don’t feel good, I want to get better”.
He responded with okay Kaitlin (full name sounded again so uncomfortably formal) are you ready to know what you have?
INSERT > STRANGLE
“POTS. You have a syndrome called POTS, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome”.
I started crying. I didn’t know what he said just meant. But it was an answer. It was the beginning to a new chapter. One we had been waiting for…
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