It sounds like you’re going through a lot. I’m sorry to hear this, but you’re not alone.

I’m a little confused—so did you already have an appointment with a Mayo Clinic provider, or did your PCP just say you should try to be seen at Mayo? I think from your second message it sounds like you had an appointment with a neurologist at Mayo, but I just want to make sure I understand.

For your question: “ Why would my doctors tell me that I would be inpatient over several days with complete testing and someone from scheduling tell me otherwise?”

I’m not really sure why they would say that, to be honest. The way the appointments are scheduled and coordinated at least in my experience is highly variable depending on the specific department and urgency of the situation. And…I’ve also found that the physicians aren’t doing the scheduling, so sometimes it’s not always clear to them how things happen. Sometimes what they say is not consistent with how things actually happen, though they don’t mean to be misleading, I presume. This has literally happened to me multiple times.

(And I don’t work for Mayo, nor am I a volunteer… I’m just a person who had a bumpy ride at Mayo, which was not the experience advertised in the commercials, and the people here are kind, and everyone is well-intentioned, so I try to help.)

My recent visits with Mayo sound similar to what you experienced. I had an in-person appointment (initial appojntment is sometimes referred to as an “evaluation”) and that appointment yielded orders for other consultations, tests, and a treatment plan (I’m pointing this out because a lot of people seem to do the “conventional Mayo model” that outside proceeds think of where all the appointments get magically coordinated for you in a week to ten day span, but I did not experience that). I then had to work with their scheduling team to get everything scheduled myself basically, and while we could try to coordinate everything in a matter of days, it wasn’t always possible to schedule everything in the same day. And consultations with different departments couldn’t always be scheduled at the same time because different clinics opened appointments at different times.

I could do some things virtually, others were better to be done in person, and others were required to be done in person. I did it that way because like you, I couldn’t just keep taking days off work to fly across the country. Even when I did, I couldn’t get things aligned.

So my experience sounds similar to what you’ve described. I was upset about it too because when I initially prepared to go, that is not how it was presented and communication with scheduling, depending on the department can be challenging.

Do you have the Mayo Clinic portal set up? If so, I’d suggest to do that. You may be able to see if you have other appointments scheduled. Orders are usually hidden, but you might be able to see a treatment plan and you’ll definitely be able to see notes from that one visit you had, to give you more clues.

What I did (because I was massively confused) is I called the department for my lead physician and I asked them to read off to me every order or referral I had so I could make my own list. Then I asked them how do I go about scheduling these things? Do we schedule them or does someone call me? What do I do? Basically the questions you posted here.

If/when I was still confused, I asked who I could talk to for help. In my case, there was a coordinator whose responsibility it was to help people in this situation. That kind of didn’t work well because she’s overwhelmed so it took a long time for her to get back to me, but in other departments I got help more quickly.

One helpful thing about Mayo is you can usually get to a human on the phone; getting to the right human is sometimes the tough part.

Not sure if that helps, but I hope you’re able to get some answers soon.