Yester Portela Gonzalez, a foot savior

“My greatest joy is to avoid an amputation. Sometimes I can’t help shedding a tear or two of happiness when I discharge a patient,” Yester Portela González, 45, a podiatrist specialized in diabetic foot care at the José Jacinto Milanés Rehabilitation Room in the city of Matanzas.

“Podiatry is the health branch that treats everything related to the foot from the ankle down, including bone, skin, corns, fungus, ingrown toenails and deformities, among other pathologies,” Portela explained. “Once we graduate as podiatrists, we move on to a higher stage, which in my case was the specialty of diabetic foot care, which treats lesions or ulcers that diabetic individuals have on their feet as a result of trauma associated with poor or no blood circulation, whether venous or arterial.”

To this end, Cuban science developed the drug called Heberprot-p, which is injected into the lesion to accelerate the granulation process or tissue growth and achieve a faster and more effective healing. This medicine has made it possible to considerably reduce the number of amputations in Cuba.

“Two cases have marked my professional life, because I consider them my only two defeats: one is a 25-year-old patient I treated in 2016 who had a very serious lesion,” he recalls. “The young man came to my office after one of his toes had been amputated and I began to treat him with Heberprot-p and heal the lesion. We agreed that I would check him up every 15 days, but he refused to see me again and engaged in a disorganized way of life. His lesion opened up again, his blood glucose levels went all wrong, and he had to undergo a foot amputation, which affected me a lot.

“My second bad experience was a man I started to treat who had an injured toe. He evolved fine thanks to Heberprot-p, but I still told him to come see me in two weeks and he never came again until six months later, and by then the amputation was unavoidable,” he lamented.

Aware of the values of preventive medicine, Portela Gonzalez advises diabetics to go to the nearest podiatry office once a month, and to their relatives that as soon as they notice any lesion, no matter how small, they should take them see a doctor without delay.

“My aspiration as a professional is to improve people's quality of life," Yester points out with the candid tone of someone who reveres his profession. "Old people say that everyone comes to earth with a goal, and I am more convinced every day that mine is to save people's feet.”