Em tinta e papel

Abstract

Opening my eyes and seeing in ink and paper my dreams from the night before. Such was the feeling I experienced when Flavia (Flavia Machado), the editor-in-chief of the Revista Brasileira de Terapia Intensiva (RBTI) told me the auspicious news about the integration of the scientific publications of the Associação de Medicina Intensiva Brasileira (AMIB) and the Sociedade Portuguesa de Cuidados Intensivos (SPCI) and invited me to write this editorial. Memories came flooding in a disorderly succession of fragments, of shared experiences with friends who are heartily important to me. The first of these friends, Rui (Rui Carrington da Costa), I met in Japan during a World Congress of Intensive Care in Kyoto in 1989. That meeting was over 20 years ago! Our friendship began with comments on "high-frequency ventilation" and progressed from that topic to many other considerations and subjects. Our long and delightful conversation was interrupted when we left each other for the last time in Innsbruck, Austria, after another congress on intensive care medicine. At this time, he was "articulating" (as we say in Portugal) our next meeting, but this meeting never occurred. I miss you, Rui... We did not meet any further, but the congress of intensive care medicine was held in Lisbon, and it was a success, "materializing" (in the typical Brazilian gerund) the meeting between our intensive care doctors that he envisioned. My friendship with Rui was a story of many meetings, always full of interesting episodes, often humorous and always happy. There were invariably opportunities for me to better observe and understand our specialty and life itself. Welcoming Rui in Sao Paulo and visiting him at his beloved Coimbra were remarkable events. Whenever we met (and those occasions were not rare at all), we never had a shortage of new ideas and projects, including Luso-Brazilian initiatives. With Rui, I came to know and admire what he described as "the most beautiful scenery in the world" (and keep in mind that Rui was well-traveled and had seen much of this wide world!): the view of the University of Coimbra from the balcony of his house! Rui introduced me to Portuguese intensive care medicine and to the Portuguese intensivists. Subsequently, these intensivists introduced me to many others. The second friend, also with this same reverie, is someone I met in 2005 in Brazil. Zé Germano (José Germano de Souza) was our guest, having accepted an invitation to come to Sao Paulo to explain to us the organization of medicine in Portugal. At the time, he was the chairman of the Ordem dos Médicos de Portugal (OMP), and I had just been elected to chair the Associação Médica Brasileira (AMB). We had barely been presented to each other, whereupon, after a few minutes of searching for common origins, we exchanged reminiscences of Angra do Heroismo in the Azores, where Jose Germano had lived in his youth, In ink and paper Em tinta e papel Jose Luiz Gomes do Amaral