“To get home, in the south bank of Lisbon, Pedro had to go up 50 steps. Bernardo, the ten-year-old son, counted them, one by one. In his last week, 50 were too many steps for that 40-year-old man. Pedro didn’t even get to the door, he didn’t return home and he never will.” This is how the reportage by Christiana Martins begins, in the latest edition of Expresso newspaper, over the last months of life of an oncologic patient that was followed up in the Unit of Continuing and Palliative Care from Hospital da Luz Lisboa, until passing away , and who has agreed to give his testimony. In an emotional but objective text, the journalist reports the story of Pedro Diogo, with 39 years old, that started to be followed in palliative care at this hospital by the end of 2019, in the sequence of complications of a colon cancer diagnosed a year before. The journalist explains the reasons for this work: “After interviewing a Belgian physician who already assisted over 200 people dying with resort to euthanasia, it was imperative to follow up those who reject this option” and Pedro Diogo “was willing to be followed up in this process”. He died on June 27, a week after the publication of the reportage, where, as she describes “he left a message hard to accept: that there is nothing to hide in the process of death”. In this process, however, palliative care is fundamental. “This is healthcare and not a psychosocial approach. We assist people of all ages and with different kinds of diseases, severe, incurable or transitory. We help who has physical pain or who does not bear the loss of capacities, of autonomy, we help the family not to aggravate the suffering of the patient and to prepare his eventual departure. This is the work of a multidisciplinary team dedicated to a rigorous symptomatic control, but going further beyond, for it also involves a psychological process of expectations adjustment. We try to do all that we should and not necessarily all that we could. The doctor does not exist solely to cure the patient, but to treat him”, explains Isabel Galriça Neto , one of the physicians that followed Pedro and who coordinates the Unit of Continuing and Palliative Care at Hospital da Luz Lisboa. “50 steps away from home” (“A 50 degraus de casa”)
