The Jimi Hendrix of the operating room

Diego González tours the world, performs 800 operations a year and is a reference in China.

If Jimi Hendrix was considered, considered and will be considered a guitar virtuoso and a star of his genre, Diego González Rivas (La Coruña, 1974) could well be his counterpart in the operating room. He has been touring all over the world for years, although like a good Galician he is always homesick to return home when he can. Not many times. «I perform 800 surgeries a year and I have done about 5.000 in my career. What I just did at the Miguel Servet hospital is the second of these characteristics that I have done in my life," he said after finishing the intervention.

His agenda is full until February 2020 and his presence in Zaragoza is the result of an excellent relationship with other surgeons and a date set some time ago. Because Rivas, above all, must work in advance to balance his daily life since he has managed to operate in more than 100 countries. "I did another case in Shanghai with these characteristics, but as far as I know, nothing like it has been done outside of China, at least in Europe," he stressed yesterday.

In 2010, he made a strong commitment, despite skepticism from the sector, to implement uniportal surgery (minimally invasive thoracic or video-assisted) in order to replace the two or three usual incisions in lung operations with one. Today it is one of the most widespread techniques. The Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital is his work center and in A Coruña where he began to forge his ideas and, currently, the reference center in Spain for this type of operations.

Yesterday he was also accompanied by César Bonome, an anesthesiologist at the La Coruña University Hospital Complex who has the greatest national experience in anesthetic techniques without orotracheal intubation. They both form the perfect couple and their precision when working, as well as their desire, was palpable during the intervention in the Servet operating rooms.