Nadia Lunardi, MD, is a general and critical care anesthesiologist driven by a personal experience in the ICU as a teenager. She helps all types of surgery patients in the operating room. She also works with heart and lung surgery patients during their initial recovery (post-surgery), while they are still in the hospital. Learn more: https://uvahealth.com/findadoctor/profile/nadia-lunardi I am a general anesthesiologist, a critical care anesthesiologist and also a clinician scientist here at UVA. In the main operating room, I take care of a variety of patients. In the critical care setting, I specialize in looking after patients that have had surgery to their heart or their lungs. I was still in high school, one of my best girlfriends, there were three of us, had a motorbike accident. She ended up needing the ICU, and I was in the ICU for a long time. That had an impact on my later decision to try to become a critical care physician to help people that find themselves in that situation. In the intensive care unit, some of these patients are with us for prolonged periods of times. We actually get to know their families and their relatives and their loved ones. You really get to develop a relationship that’s personal with the patient, but also with the people that know the patient well. And that’s really, it’s very powerful.