It has been 50 years since a generation of Avilan doctors graduated, a lesson and a pride. We spoke to Ramón Riverón Rodríguez
The sound of his crutch penetrates the floor and precedes him long before we can see his silhouette in a hallway of the Doctor Antonio Luaces Iraola Provincial General Teaching Hospital. He is a very tall man with glasses, gray hair and a good-natured smile that not even the worst guard could erase.
“You see me with a stick, but it’s not because I’m old. I had an accident in 2015 that left me in a wheelchair for a year and I rehabilitated in Havana. For this reason, I walk with crutches and visits are conducted sitting down. They thought he wouldn’t come back and they were wrong. “I can’t be in the house, I’m only 75 years old.”
Since then, his pace has become slower and more plaintive, although he hasn’t been able to shake certain manias, such as his alarm clock going off at 5:45 a.m. every day. He puts on his white coat and arrives with enough time to find out everything that has happened in his absence and armed with questions and answers about the handover, the moment when the “Council of Elders”, as he himself calls it, values it lays handles the most difficult cases and makes medical decisions that later save lives.
He has dedicated 50 years to medicine, a record that has left him very little time for the rest of the everyday and everyday things and has placed him at the top of a select list that includes the first specialists of the time to receive their doctorates here . 1980s.
The title “First Degree Specialist in Gynecology and Obstetrics” is kept in a folder arranged by date and importance, in which we find both a diploma of recognition for his work and a photo of him in the Sahara. But this is another story.
At that time, the event and meeting room was being prepared for the state medical examination and people flocked to it, excited by the news about the new doctors in a still young province. “A Roman circus,” as he jokingly remembers, with fear in his stomach and cold hands.
But after seven years of bringing children into the world and judging mothers without role or title, few questions could get him through. The most important day of his life ended the way he had dreamed: with joy and with the certainty that he had not chosen the wrong career.
In fact, he never had any doubts. It was enough for a small group of brave people to attend a birth at the Maternidad Obrera Hospital in Havana for them to fall hopelessly in love and decide to become obstetricians in the first year of their studies. You have fulfilled it.
• Read interviews with other Avilan doctors who are popular with people here
There he also learned to wash, cook, make the bed and leave the house he left at the age of 13 to learn to read and write and get his high school diploma, only to rush back and rarely come to visit occasions.
With enormous youth and inexperience, he faced seemingly endless guards when the Morón Hospital was just beginning to be organized and the specialists could be counted on his fingers. “I thought I knew a lot, but after three days I realized I knew nothing, and when I was confused I had to run to find the only specialist there was.”
Then life and his persistence made everything right. He served three times as head of the obstetrics and gynecology service, was director of the health center in Morón and began to accumulate merit and knowledge in the same proportion. He completed training in perinatology, obstetric emergencies, breastfeeding, healthcare administration and even medical training that put him on a plane to Russia and Armenia.
Between the embracing coldness and the confused language, he understood that “even the Russians didn’t know that much and the Cubans weren’t backwards either,” and learned very innovative surgical techniques for the time to correct congenital genital deformities.
Riverón saved every memory and paper with the passion of a collector. He also doesn’t forget names or dates and delights in anecdotes that bring tears to his eyes, sometimes accidentally, sometimes because they come from the heart.
There are at least three unwritten rules that were a kind of mantra for him: abdominal pain is an ectopic pregnancy until proven otherwise, postmenopausal bleeding may be cancer, and a patient who repeats it in the waking body must be admitted and studied.
• Other doctors from Ciego de Ávila have given the same dedication and commitment to their work, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Read their stories
Implementing it to the letter gave him peace of mind and recorded very few deaths in all his years of work. As he endured them, he calmly laid his head on the pillow, knowing that he had done everything to save himself and that no death certificate would bear his signature until scientific evidence made everything clear. It wasn’t out of pride, but because “the longer you live, the more you learn, there are very rare syndromes and things that only happen once in thousands.” Knowing what happened to a patient removes doubts and enables “It gives you the opportunity to keep going and be vigilant.”
Important as it was for his students to teach and learn beyond any methodological demands, which he postponed from time to time in favor of healthy conversation and rigorous practice.
When asked by the other side that child mortality used to be higher, he answers bluntly, giving him a big advantage over the audience: “It doesn’t just depend on the doctors.” With the Medical Genetics Program, technical advances like “With fetal monitors and risk counseling before conception, there are more accurate diagnoses and lower chances of death.”
He then takes a photo in very old sepia, from the time when there were no colors for printing. “That’s me next to a camel, I don’t look anything like that anymore.” Without careful depiction of the details, one might think that the snapshot is a compact mass of sand that cannot be located on the map.
Riverón sticks to the common thread: “It was in 1988, during my first medical mission in the so-called Saharan Arab Democratic Republic, a state with limited recognition that faced Morocco in the unresolved conflict over the sovereignty of the Sahara.”
My surprised face must have been enough to give me a shorter version of the matter: “They were refugee camps, without air conditioning or heating, with temperatures of up to 48 degrees during the day and 10 degrees at night, where there was war.” half”.
As accurate as his descriptions were, they probably did not do justice to what he experienced for more than a year, a period that he was able to complete, unlike many of his colleagues who were unable to withstand the harsh living conditions and isolation .
“There were thousands of tents lined up. We worked Monday through Saturday, from 6:00 a.m. until 11:00 a.m. when we stopped because of the heat. We doused ourselves with water and rested on some mattresses. At the weekend we went to a 20-room house where we drank homemade rum. When we treated the wounded, the days lasted until dawn and were tiring.”
There, for the first time, the naked face of death was sketched when a child or a woman died, and the joke of putting sand on the mattress in Cuba in order to be able to sleep with free legs again after so much storm became popular and swirling .
The diploma, which he jealously keeps in his yellow folder, reads: “He carried out his mission with responsibility and dedication in the difficult conditions of the desert and in the face of imminent war.” He was faced with limited resources and a delicate situation of isolation and Restrictions on freedom of movement are faced. He participated in the development of the program project to reduce child mortality in this country. He deserves the status of a Vanguard Internationalist Worker.” He returned healthy enough to continue without rest, and with that in mind; Cape Verde and Angola were comfortable and quiet stays that allowed him to have different experiences.
At this point you have come to the conclusion that obstetrics is not the most difficult specialty, but one of the most difficult, since it requires constant work, increased responsibility and a strong character to make decisions that determine the lives of two people.
That’s why you have to be in the hospital, face difficult cases, endure insults with humility and argue whenever necessary. You have to learn from every mistake. You have to be everything that took half of his life to then be sure that he didn’t miss the promise of the first day.