Children suffer in a relentless war
Andriy Serbyn is 27; he is an anesthesiologist with Hospital No. 4 in the Left-Bank district of Mariupol. He told his story to ABO Local Media Development Agency, a collaboration between 45 newspapers and 300 journalists spread across Ukraine. They are linked by a common website — Svoi.global — and now the Boston Herald.
There is a notion of “a golden hour” in medical practice, which means that after a trauma, a patient has to receive assistance as soon as possible. Nobody from Mariupol was brought to us within the “golden hour.”
There were people lying in the street with their legs torn off for several days before someone would find them and send them to us. There were such blood losses that it was unclear how a person survived the surgery.
I can’t give you the exact figures, but it seems to me that every fifth person died after being brought in for medical assistance. It was surprising for me because in conditions of no water or electricity, without the entire staff of specialists, with periodic massive admissions when there were more wounded than medical workers, there were still more survivors than the ones we lost.
During the entire period, we had about 15 wounded children. The most severe cases were brain injuries. Our hospital didn’t specialize in neuro trauma, so we didn’t have any neurosurgeons.
I remember the first girl very well. Her name was Ania. There was an explosion; a wheel was blown away from the car and hit the back of the girl’s head.
Everybody attended to the child right away. One of our young traumatologists did a decompressive craniectomy. He had performed a surgery that was outside his sphere of professional competence. It was as if a general practitioner conducted an appendectomy.
After the shelling, a mother, a grandmother, and a 1-year-old child went to the yard to cook their meal. A shell hit the yard. Everybody had head injuries. The mother had mere scratches. The grandmother had a rather severe trauma to her face, skull, and her eye was badly injured.
As for the boy, a piece of shrapnel hit his head. The entrance-exit wound went through the front part of his skull. When he was brought in, he was still alive. The content of his skull was on the outside. Of course, the mother refused to accept that there were no chances. We anesthetized the child. Unfortunately, that was all we could do to help. The 1-year-old child died 15 minutes after his admission to the hospital.
One day, we received two children, aged 10 and 16. As far as I understood, they were not related but brought from the same city area. They had the most severe brain injuries. We couldn’t help them. We merely anesthetized them. We put one on top of the other. We covered them with a blanket. That was the end.