Cristina Pestana, assistant coordinator of the Operating Room and of the Department of Anesthesiology of the Hospital da Luz Lisboa, gave an interview to the DN , in which she speaks of her family roots, of the reasons why she opted for this medical specialty, of how she faces medicine and of some of the patients who mark her life. «If medicine is just computers, medicine is gone. This is a relationship between people»: this is one of her statements, which makes the title of the interview. ( Photo: Orlando Almeida/Global Imagens) Full interview of Cristina Pestana Physician for 34 years , having made much of her course at the Hospital de Santa Maria , in Lisbon, before integrating the Hospital da Luz in 2006 , Cristina Pestana explains throughout this interview why she argues that it is the anesthesiologist who runs the Surgery Block : «The surgeon is operating an organ, but the patient is not only this organ. For example, we are operating a patient to the liver, suddenly the patient has an arrhythmia and I have to say 'stop'. Therefore, who determines the course of things in boundary situations is I (...). And I also choose the timings, establish limits and priorities». 'Sometimes we don't hit. We are neither perfect nor gods' After remembering the difficult stories of patients she helped save , some of whom became her friends, the physician reveals how she deals with surgeries that run wrong and can’t keep people alive. «When a patient dies, in the Surgery Block or outside the Surgery Block, it is a difficult sensation to explain by words. I remember, for example, all the conversations we had... I had recently a patient who entered the Surgery Block and said ‘doctor, I am in your hands' and my hands were not enough to keep him alive. It's very difficult if we think we've done everything we can. What we can do is study more to see if science discovers other things», says Cristina Pestana, adding that she remembers each of these cases . For this and other reasons, she concludes, anesthesiology «is an extremely exhausting specialty». The daily life of Cristina Pestana in the Anesthesiologist Department can be seen in this documentary from Hospital da Luz Lisboa.
