Ok.. Going Home:::::::
Again folks .. sorry it has been so long.. but this has been a remarkably busy disaster. I am going to be home by noonish on Oct 2 back in Highlands Ranch. I got good reviews and was pleased to be able to do this work. It is good to have positive feelings out of one of these.
I do have some thoughts about this place though. Rochester is a city of sick people really. The Mayo Clinic is for real and it attracts tens of thousands of patients here all year long. The Clinic is simply huge.. spread all over town and perhaps 1/3 of the 90,000 residents work for this health concern. If you are just passing through you would not notice it, you afterall see sick people all the time... but it is the scale and overwhelming numbers of them here.. is really sad after awhile. One of the features here is people profoundly deformed either by accident or disease or birth. One man was so altered he wore essentially a hood that was see through to him. he was eating at a buffett.. and faced the wall to eat... I saw what can best be described as a walking cadaver.. he was grey, sunken and eating dinner with what appeared to be his family.
If you are here for three meals a day.... you see families coping with the best and worst of things life can throw you. You can see families trying to come to grips with the worst news.. groups of people undergoing treatments out on the town to get pie... On balance what you see here is hope.... Overwhelming hope.. sick kids smiling cause they believe they are getting better.. parents smiling cause they cannot contemplate the alternative.... disfigured men and women hoping to feel restored... sons and daughters trying to find a way to take mom home one last time.... Perhaps if you live here long enough this all becomes part of the landscape.. but for me .. for five weeks... I have been thankful that I am happy and whole.. that I have choices that are not all bad and most of all that I am almost 56 and just now discovered what a place like the Mayo Clinic is all about.
Good luck folks.. I will post again.. new disasters after the first of the year unless a big hurricane strikes somewhere in a nice place in the south... (= anywhere but LA)
I do have some thoughts about this place though. Rochester is a city of sick people really. The Mayo Clinic is for real and it attracts tens of thousands of patients here all year long. The Clinic is simply huge.. spread all over town and perhaps 1/3 of the 90,000 residents work for this health concern. If you are just passing through you would not notice it, you afterall see sick people all the time... but it is the scale and overwhelming numbers of them here.. is really sad after awhile. One of the features here is people profoundly deformed either by accident or disease or birth. One man was so altered he wore essentially a hood that was see through to him. he was eating at a buffett.. and faced the wall to eat... I saw what can best be described as a walking cadaver.. he was grey, sunken and eating dinner with what appeared to be his family.
If you are here for three meals a day.... you see families coping with the best and worst of things life can throw you. You can see families trying to come to grips with the worst news.. groups of people undergoing treatments out on the town to get pie... On balance what you see here is hope.... Overwhelming hope.. sick kids smiling cause they believe they are getting better.. parents smiling cause they cannot contemplate the alternative.... disfigured men and women hoping to feel restored... sons and daughters trying to find a way to take mom home one last time.... Perhaps if you live here long enough this all becomes part of the landscape.. but for me .. for five weeks... I have been thankful that I am happy and whole.. that I have choices that are not all bad and most of all that I am almost 56 and just now discovered what a place like the Mayo Clinic is all about.
Good luck folks.. I will post again.. new disasters after the first of the year unless a big hurricane strikes somewhere in a nice place in the south... (= anywhere but LA)
posted by Steve Morse- Adventures in Disasters at 6:18 PM
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