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:
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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.
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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.
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And to cement in that point, outside of downtown, almost everything commercial is along the same road or at least very close to it.
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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.
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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.)
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For some reason, there are two malls here. One is absolutely massive. Again, something you would expect in a much larger municipality.
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There’s also an absolutely massive pawn shop, I guess because people need to pawn stuff to pay their medical bills?
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
evil Scrabble player who always wins through placing tiles in the most dickish ways she can
Okay, now I’m starting to like your mom more. This is exactly how I play in my Wordfeud league (Wordfeud is a scrabble clone app that’s way less enshittified than WwF or the official app), since I refuse to to keep track of which tiles are left, because that’s boring but I still need an equalizer. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it’s okay to leave openings if you can just actually outplay your opponent.
You can like her for her evil Scrabble playing if you want, but there are better reasons.
Despite all of her crazy, my mom is a likeable person. But I have a feeling she would even make people like you hate her playing it because it is just spiteful. She plays Scrabble like other people play Monopoly. It’s entirely about “fuck over everyone else.” But I have to admit, she’s very good at it.
jumex mango nectar is the shit
Agreed. Unfortunately, what I got was not Jumex.
Hecho con pulpa de Aloe Natural
Little chunks of mango is not “pulpa.” I could have handled drinking “pulpa.” It tasted good, but drinks that I have to chew is not something I can handle right now.
What a strange sounding city.
Definitely. I’ve never experienced anything like it. I’m not the most well-traveled person in the world, but I’ve been to a lot of the U.S. and I’ve been to multiple other countries and this is by far the oddest city I’ve ever been to.
Feel better, Squiddy!
Thanks!
There’s a mochinut at the Mall of America near Minneapolis. I’ve had one of their donuts and it was pretty good. Pretty chewy. I’d never seen one before either, but it looks like it’s a relatively new chain.
I like Mochi and I like donuts, so I’d definitely at least give one a try if it were possible. Not so sure about the rice hot dogs though. I’m not a fan of tofu dogs, so I’m not sure if I’d like the rice ones.
My mom was in the Mayo clinic years ago, but she didn’t describe it to be like an airport.
If she had, I would’ve made a beeline up there so I could have a bloody Mary at six in the morning without getting any funny looks.
On a more serious note, I hope you find some relief from this visit.
On a less serious note, my sister plays Scrabble with these weird count the words within the word rules. She judiciously saves up her letters until she can play “braved” in which there are like seventy five thousand words embedded.
I don’t particularly care for Scrabble, but I especially won’t play it with her.
Yep, that’s my mom with Scrabble too. My whole family hates it.
And the problem with the bloody Mary part is that it’s an airport with no bars (although there are some nearby). Too bad, because I also like a bloody Mary. There was a bar and grill in the town where I live that had a ‘bloody Mary bar’ for brunch every Sunday. I learned about it soon after I stopped eating and now the restaurant is gone. I’m really disappointed.
Anyway, thanks for the kind words!
I’ve been to one of those bloody Mary bars once in my life and it was glorious. I haven’t been able to find one since. It was eleven years ago up in Tulsa, and I’m down here in boring old Dallas.
Try taking up chess. Instead of just being a game you can play, it has a huge amount of history and depth, so that you can actually sink your whole brain into it for as long as your mental endurance and boredom hold.
The amount of online content for it has reached gargantuan proportions in recent years, so you shouldn’t run out of material any time during this lifetime, and it’s all accessible from a hotel room with wifi.
I’d recommend Eric Rosen as an initial instructor. He’s a master, not a GM, but his approach is good for beginners, and his overall tone would be good during more stressful life circumstances.
Chess.com is a perfectly acceptable platform to play on, but you also have a mom nearby if you’d prefer some over-the-board.
I don’t know about her or even if she’s interested in chess, but I am an amazingly bad chess player. I like chess conceptually, but I am so bad at it. When I was in school, I joined chess club. I lost my first game in two moves. I never went back to chess club. You know how they say in chess you are supposed to think three moves ahead? My one move ahead plans are usually based on very bad predictions. Also, I like how knights move, so I end up moving them because I think it’s neat. I think I should probably be legally banned from playing the game.
Anyway, I don’t ever remember her being interested in chess. I played chess with my dad sometimes (it was the only board game he cared about), but she’s definitely a Scrabble fan when it comes to board games.
I think a jigsaw puzzle is a better bet, but thanks for the suggestion.
(Incidentally, I have a long-dead relative who was a chess grandmaster in France in the 1950s. Apparently we don’t share the chess gene.)
I actually have been to Mayo too, but not for health reasons. Was super interesting to see how many skyscrapers there are in such a technically small city. Most of the buildings seem to be related to Mayo too. I was there in the winter and the brown buildings all seemed pretty ugly combined with the dead foliage. But once the snow hit, it made everything really pretty.
Sorry I have a hard time remembering from your last posts…you said you don’t mind the smell of coffee…are you able to drink it? One thing I found mildly interesting during my visit was just how big Caribou Coffee is in Minnesota. It’s no different than any chain coffee place really, but I had to get some for myself just to say I did haha.
Have you met anyone with a Minnesota accent yet? It’s kind of amusing. More common in older individuals as opposed to younger ones, altho still pretty rare.
Sadly, only one person with a Minnesota accent. I really love the accent too.
I’ve been to Minneapolis a couple of times in the 90s and the first time wasn’t too long after Fargo came out and literally the first thing I heard someone say when I got out of the car was, “oh, yah.” I loved it.
Anyway, I’ve never been a coffee drinker. I don’t care for bitter drinks much, so I only drink coffee and beer in social settings when there’s nothing else on offer. I haven’t even tried either since this started. The smell is fine though. And yeah, Caribou is everywhere- and more expensive than Starbucks, at least for chai lattes (my go-to). Also, their chai tasted awful.
Squid man, fuckin hell mate, you sure do overthink things. You need to lay off the dope.
According to the demographics I looked up, Rochester is 6% Latino, and yet almost the entire international foods aisle of the Walmart grocery…
Mate, I’m up in buttfuck nowhere in the Alps and a fifth of the world food aisle is mexican. Closest thing we’ve got here is the odd Spaniard. It’s just good food, plus yanks have a fucking weird obsession with race.
Also, not one single bit of what you’ve listed as your mum’s “craziness” is unusual behaviour, especially for a mum whose kid is clearly mentally unstable
Give her a break and lay off the shit that’s fucking your brain up man
You have absolutely no understanding of trigeminal neuralgia or what has to be done to treat it. You seem to think everyone who uses cannabis does it for pleasure.
Also, what the fuck did I do to you for you to call me mentally unstable? Because my non-eating might be behavioral? Thanks, Doctor Asshole.
Blocked.
