On October 12, 2002, Diego Gonzalez Rivas (La Coruña, 1974) was going to the Sari Club, the Indonesian club where more than 200 people died that day in an attack attributed to Al-Qaeda. He was saved “for a minute”. Paradoxes of Fate, eight years later, he invented a technique with which has saved the lives of thousands of patients worldwide.
This Galician surgeon understood very early on that death is never an option. When he was little, his family would record him on a cassette saying something like, “I wish you a happy new year and may no member of the family die.” The recording, in reality, was a pretext to preserve—as he does with the lives of others—the jokes he told, with which he tried to “make people happy.”
Later, when he accompanied his mother to the hospital where she worked as a nurse, he realized that being a doctor could also make people happy. His first option was plastic surgery.I never thought about what I would become “If I had chosen it,” González Rivas tells EL ESPAÑOL from an airport (his second, or almost first, home).
“It would be completely different,” he continues, “but I think the path I chose was the right one. I’m happy with what I’ve achieved and the life I’m leading, because nothing important is achieved easily“To do this, he had to sacrifice relationships with friends or even start a family: “If you devote yourself so much to your job, you have to give up a lot of things.”
You only need to listen to it for a few minutes to verify that this dedication is not imposed. “I am so passionate that I turned my job into my lifestyle. By not seeing it as a job, I never get tired of it. In recent years, in fact, he only remembers two times when he spent “a lot of time” without entering an operating room.
The last one was last year when he climbed Kilimanjaro. He spent five days without surgery and felt “strange”. He also has this feeling when he is in a country (he has operated on 136 in total) and he does not have to operate: “It’s like I’m wandering.”
This “frantic pace” translates into 1,000 major surgical procedures per year. A surgeon in Spain usually practices between 60 and 80. For him, having a higher volume of operations than the average does not affect the final result, quite the contrary: it gives him “much more ease and experience.”
stones on the road
González Rivas knew, when he opted for thoracic surgery, that the operations he was going to perform would have very difficult postoperative periods, during which the patient would feel a lot of pain due to the operation being performed. In the United States, however, there was a group that, since the beginning of the century, had managed to reduce the intervention to two incisions (so far, at least three have been made).
In 2007, González Rivas contacted the team leaderDr. Thomas A. D’Amico, who rejected his request to visit the hospital because they did not know each other. When he approached him at a conference in the United States, he changed his mind and told him to send him an email. He had to do it from a new address so as not to realize that it was the same Spanish surgeon he had recently turned down.
After learning the technique, returned to Spain to implement and improve it. Why not make one incision instead of two? In June 2010, he operated on the first lung cancer patient with this innovative procedure called “Uniportal VATS”, a technique that allows complex surgical interventions to be performed through a single incision three or four centimeters long, without the need to separate the ribs.
As they say, the student surpassed the teacher. Although the “teachers” I had at the time at the Galician hospital They did not appreciate the 36-year-old surgeon trying to innovate. in the technique. The stones in the road existed. “When someone stands out or wants to do something out of the ordinary, people come out who will not support him and will attack him,” he laments. “But that’s human nature, you have to learn to deal with it.”
He, he said, fought “against all odds“to transform problems into “opportunities”. These obstacles are precisely what made it not have as much notoriety in Spain at the beginning. This also influences that of our country —unlike in the United States, where those who “stand out for something” are promoted— “Many scientists had to leave because they had enough support.” Although he believes that the situation “is changing.”
Broncano’s Operation
González Rivas became known to the general public last Wednesday night, when he was invited to The revolt. It wasn’t the first time he met comedian and presenter David Brocano. Four years ago, he interviewed him The Resistance. Following this interview, the Galician surgeon offered him the possibility of operating on his palmar hyperhidrosis, a pathology that causes the patient’s hands to sweat excessivelyarmpits or feet.
Before, in thoracic surgery, you had to open the patient and put your hands in (your hands!) @dgonzalezrivas He comes in, makes a 3 cm incision and you walk out two days later. It really blows your mind that something like this is possible. This man is a visionary. pic.twitter.com/2WBLHV0VIS
– La Revuelta (@LaRevuelta_TVE) September 18, 2024
Broncano himself recently acknowledged in an interview that he appreciates that people sacrifice almost nothing for their work. This attitude of prioritizing life over professional success has spread among the younger generation under the name of “silent ambition” (“quiet ambition“, in English). González Rivas finds it “curious” that New generations attach less importance to work.
He feels he is “less creative than before.” “Yes, you are creative when it comes to creating content for networks, but it is about just entertaining, there is not much creativity in trying to change the world“. He also observes “less dedication” than in previous generations: “I see it in Medicine. Before, you were called to do internships, and even if they didn’t pay you, you went in head first. Today, they are more selective when it comes to having more free time. Even if that seems completely valid to me.”
By exposing itself to a wider audience in the new program of ETPThis surgeon has been heavily criticized on social media for admitting to having operated in countries where human rights are not respected or on people who have committed crimes.I am a doctor and I try to preserve health“regardless of the country or the circumstances of each one,” defends González Rivas, who would not even refuse to operate against the terrorists who, 22 years ago, were on the verge of ending their lives.
