For David R. Baquero Z., medicine was not a choice: it was his destiny. His paternal grandfather was a birth attendant who died the same year David was born.
As the family tells it, in the middle of labor his mother suffered what appeared to be a massive hemorrhage. She then saw his grandfather beside her bed, wearing the rubber sleeves of his trade. She felt a calm that let her fall asleep and, inexplicably, the emergency vanished without a trace.
Growing up with that story taught him that medicine arose in him naturally and inevitably. He is not someone who chose to work as a doctor; he is someone who was always meant to be one. Today, as a colon and rectal surgeon, epidemiologist and university professor, he brings colorectal surgery from the world's best centers to Colombia, without losing sight of the person behind every diagnosis.
Like Camus's Sisyphus, Dr. Baquero takes on the immense responsibility of the cancer operating room every day, a boulder that never gets lighter. He carries it with epidemiological, evidence-based rigor, but also with genuine joy, total dedication and a radical optimism that his patients feel from the very first visit.
