Cilia Mercado de Garces

Mayo Clinic's team approach to diagnosing and treating patients keeps people like Socorro de Garcés and her family coming back.

Cilia Mercado de Garcés did not intend to start a family tradition. But that is what she did the first time she visited Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., more than 50 years ago. Since the now-deceased matriarch, who lived a long and healthy life, came to Mayo Clinic seeking medical care, two other generations of the Garcés family have traveled from Colombia for checkups and advanced care.

Her granddaughter, Socorro de Garcés, counts her mother and father, her aunts (including one who is 91), a brother, a brother-in-law, her husband and herself as patients who have followed Cilia's footsteps to Mayo Clinic.

"My mother Virginia is 83 years old and doing fine," Garcés says. "She had heart surgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester six or seven years ago, and she's had knee replacement surgery at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville three years ago and one year ago with Dr. Mary O'Connor."

Garcés and her family have collected a few friends at Mayo Clinic. In Jacksonville, the list includes Drs. Manuel Rodríguez from Executive and International Medicine, Bernd-Uwe Sevin from Medical and Surgical Gynecology and Cándido Rivera from Hematology/Oncology. The family considers them good friends and sources of medical and emotional support, says Garcés.

Garcés got to know the Jacksonville doctors during her treatment for endometrial cancer in 2005. She had come for a second opinion on a gynecological problem, and a malignancy was detected on the lining of her uterus. She had surgery at Mayo Clinic in May, followed by chemo- therapy, which she completed in September.

Rodríguez assembled the team of doctors who treated her. After the surgery to remove the cancerous lesion and the surrounding tissue, Garcés recovered well and began a course of chemotherapy followed by radiation.

"The doctors arranged themselves in a workgroup and coordinated all the care I needed," Garcés says. "They gave each other, as well as my family, excellent support."

Garcés also had a team of nurses specialized in oncology and chemotherapy treatment who made the process more bearable. The chemotherapy area at Mayo Clinic is designed to accommodate patients in private rooms and to make them as comfortable as possible during the outpatient treatments, which were every three weeks for Garcés. The staff closely monitored her body's response to the chemotherapy to lessen any side effects.

Garcés currently is undergoing follow-up radiation treatments at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where the family lives during part of the year. She says she is impressed by the collaboration between the Mayo Clinic and Sloan Kettering doctors. She has responded well to the treatment and considers herself — and her family — lucky that coming to Mayo Clinic has been possible over the years.

"It has been an experience from which we can distill positive energy," she says.

Services for
International Patients

Traveling long distances for medical care can be stressful. From the patient's phone calls to their return home and afterward, Mayo Clinic strives to provide superior service. Specialized, multilingual appointment personnel are dedicated to meeting the unique needs of international patients and their families planning a visit to Mayo Clinic. Help with estimates and billing, finding hotels and transportation and interpreting in nine languages are available through the International Services office. These services continue once patients arrive at Mayo Clinic and after they return home. Office hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Eastern Time) Monday through Friday. For more information, call (904) 953-7000 or send an e-mail to intl.mcj@mayo.edu.

In 2005, about 43 patients from Colombia came to Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. More than 1,360 international patients representing 95 countries visited the clinic last year.

(This story first appeared in the March 2006 issue of The Mayo Clinic Checkup, a complimentary newsletter available to anyone interested in the latest news from Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla.)