Vascular surgeon of the Department of Surgery at Chernihiv City Hospital No. 3
After February 24, my work changed radically, as it did for most doctors. Of course, no one was ready for war. I had a certain training, because I studied at the military faculty of a medical university, I dreamed of becoming a military medic, but for certain reasons it did not happen, so I am a vascular surgeon.
So, I was hardly ever at home. It is hard to remember such moments. This is exactly what you really want to forget, but you can't. When the heat, water, and electricity disappeared, it became too difficult, because we had to operate at a temperature of +8 in the operating room. I put on two surgical suits and warm socks to somehow warm up.
I was asked to stay because one of them suspected a vascular injury. I suspected that the patient had a popliteal artery injury. And so was it. We took him to the operating room. At the same moment, the shelling started again, and we had to operate under the flashlights of mobile phones. The man had lost a lot of blood before that, so the operation was extremely difficult.
Muscles died, and kidney failure began. The next operation was another artillery barrage. I understood that I would be happy to "drive" the doctors out of the operating room to hide, but I couldn’t do that, because it's not like every hand, every finger was needed.
After the amputation, we tried to get the necessary medicines, blood, and plasma for the patient, because all the supplies were used, and the blood transfusion station was also damaged during the shelling. Fortunately, volunteers helped us in this.
The boy was stabilized, but he still had severe gunshot wounds in his arm. Our traumatologists could not do anything because there were no necessary devices. And the boy was getting worse and worse. Infectious complications arose, re-amputation had to be done. However, we could not operate on his hand, it needed serious antibacterial therapy, normal living conditions, which we could not provide in the blocked city.
Fortunately, at the end of March, the boy was evacuated. And recently I found out that he was taken to Kyiv then. Then there was a very difficult treatment, but he is alive and continues to fight.
