Chapter Two

The Journey

The making of a physician — from a medical school in Quito across the hospitals of Barcelona, the clinics of France and the wards of Ohio, and home again to the children of Ecuador.

The Formation of a Doctor

From Quito to the World, and Back

Before the missions, before the textbooks, before four decades at the bedside of children, there was a long apprenticeship. Dr. Ernesto Quiñones trained across three continents — Ecuador, Europe and the United States — gathering the disciplines that would later meet in a single practice: pediatrics, intensive care and pulmonology.

What follows is that path, in the order it was walked.

The Path

Years of Training

Each stop added a discipline — and a way of seeing the breath and the lungs of a child.

1979–1986

Universidad Central del Ecuador — Quito

Medical school. The degree in Medicine that began it all, in his home city.

1987–1992

Universitat de Barcelona — Spain

Specialization as a pediatric intensivist and pediatric pulmonologist, anchored at the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona — with rotations through Clínica Quirón, Hospital Comarcal de Igualada, Hospital de Martorell and Clínica Corachan.

1996

Return to Ecuador

Newly trained in pediatric critical care, he returned home and — with Dr. Santiago Campos and Dr. Michele Ugazzi — set about reforming the care of critically ill children in the country's public hospitals.

1999–2000

Nationwide Children's Hospital — Columbus, Ohio

Further training in pediatric pulmonology in the United States, working with the hospital's Cystic Fibrosis group.

France

Centre d'Asthmologie du Somail

Training in asthmology — the study and treatment of asthma — at the French center that lends its name to his credentials.

What It Became

A Single Practice

These disciplines — intensive care, pulmonology, the surgical airway — did not stay separate. They converged in Quito, in a practice and a series of missions devoted to the breathing of children, and in the first pediatric pulmonology textbook written in Ecuador.

The chapters that follow trace where that training led: into operating rooms with Operation Airway, into the clinic as a pediatric pulmonologist, onto the page, and across the world on more than fifty medical brigades.