Carlos Ferreira is a general surgeon at Hospital da Luz Lisboa and, during holidays, he has participated in humanitarian missions of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders in countries at war. “It is always an enticing challenge. We get caught up in people’s suffering in such places and we feel that we really make a difference”, he explains in an interview to SIC channel , during the TV show “Casa Feliz”, on September 4. The surgeon confesses that the experience that touched him the most , was in the first country he went to, South Sudan, in 2014: “When I got back, I thought ‘I’ll never do this again!’. Because from the psychological point of view, it is a permanent state of stress, for we come across victims that really shock us. But then I thought of those who remained there and the colleagues that worked with me… and decided I had to return there”. After Sudan, there were missions in war theatres in Congo, Yemen and Iraq. “I use the vacations period and the time that the hospital gives me (because the hospital understands and promotes such work). Along the interview to SIC channel, Carlos Ferreira explains clearly the differences and the conditions in which he and other professionals have to work: “Here, I work in a multidisciplinary hospital, with the latest equipment and, all of the sudden, I go to places where there is not even electricity and piped water. Here, we perform robotic and oncologic surgeries, and there we encounter multiple victims and multiple wounds, from weapons of war, bombs, mines, etc. It’s a kind of surgery we don’t have in the West”. In Mosul (Iraq), Carlos Ferreira does not forget the case of a woman who lost four of her children, when her house was bombarded, besides she and a fifth child getting injured: “When she was released from hospital, she was smiling and I asked her why. ‘I’m alive and I have a child to take care of’, she answered me”. Carlos Ferreira on SIC channel
