On the 16th of February Denys was talking to his older daughter who lives in Israel and is training to be a Radiologist. Russians were massing up huge numbers of troops and firepower units at Ukraine border, and with each day a large-scale invasion was getting more and more likely.
“Dad, you have to come over now” – she pleaded.
“Sorry darling, but I can’t” – said Denys with no hesitation in his voice.
He had thought his choices through many times by then. Being Jewish he would not have had any problems emigrating to Israel at any time, but as he put it during our conversation “I would have to have erased all the contacts from my phone, my social media, my whole life here –anything that would have reminded me about my betrayal”. He does not mix up words now talking about it. He had tried to find some excuses to leave his beloved Ukraine when things were getting hot again, the main excuse being his wife and a 14-year-old daughter. On that evening they had another conversation about it at a dinner table, and his wife confirmed that nothing had changed since the last one – she was fully behind his decision to stay.
For Denys, as for many Ukrainians the war had started in 2014. Being an anaesthetist and intensivist by training, he worked at a children’s hospital as the Head of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the time. Dnipro was only 200 kilometres from the frontline, so Denys quickly became very experienced in treating combat trauma in both children, and adults. It was his leadership, and clinical experience which he had gained at that time that made him want to stay this time and help his people in case the war had broken out.
He had known full well that Dnipro would be one of the first cities to be hit if Russians had decided to go all in, and it did turn out to be the case – the city was heavily bombed, and its airport was completely destroyed on the first day of the war on February, the 24th. Denys and his colleagues got very busy treating the types of injuries that they had gotten very familiar with during the war of 2014, which had never really ended…
The first two weeks of war were pure hell. When I asked Denys about what it was like, he simply said:
“I was paralysed with fear. We did not know what was going on outside of our hospital where we were living. I could not eat, or sleep. I knew full well what was coming if Dnipro had fallen – the “filtration camps”, execution lists, indiscriminate killings and mass rapes. I knew that both I and my family were on those lists because I had been, and was treating wounded Ukrainian soldiers, and was actively involved in improving the care of combat casualties in Ukraine”.
Then, on the 5th of March their hospital was bombed. They managed to evacuate all the neonates from their intensive care unit down to the basement. Those who were on breathing machines were being ventilated manually by the nurses just like survivors of the Polio epidemic in the 1950s. A short video of this was posted online and gathered more than 50 million views.
On that day, it became clear to Denys that it was time to get his family out of there. He needed to get them to Warsaw, as Sochnut, the Jewish Agency fostering the immigration of Jews in diaspora to Israel was located there. He planned their journey towards the Polish border with the aim to get to Lviv as there was a bus, which would then take them to Warsaw from there.
He planned their trip very carefully. It was not a straight line, as he had to be absolutely sure that there were no Russian troops on their way. He filled up the tank, as well as three canisters with petrol, and they drove towards Uman, a city about 300 kilometres to the west from Dnipro. They were met with what Denys himself describes as “Biblical scenes” – people trying to escape from the war zone en masse, all at the same time. “Only camels were lacking”, and Moses to lead them… The journey that normally takes about five hours, took them about twenty. There were chaotic scenes in Sumy as thousands of people were arriving in the city and were searching for food and places to stay. Denys was lucky as he had managed to book a room at a hotel earlier on. They ate some tasteless tinned food that they had brought with them and fell asleep with a roof over their heads. They were luckier than most on that night…
The next destination was Vinnytsa, a large regional centre to the west of Uman. They had friends there who had offered them their place to stay. They journey was long, and slow as masses of people were going in the same direction – to the West either to safer parts of the country, or towards its borders trying to get out of it. As they were approaching Vinnytsa late at night, they experienced another spectacle that would stay with them for a long time – about fifty kilometres in front of them Vinnytsa airport was incinerated by Russian ballistic missiles. The roar of explosions, the massive fire that lit up the night sky – they felt like they were entering a portal to Hell…
They reached their friends safely and spent the night with them. On the following morning they went further westbound towards Ternopyl, and then Lviv. They were finally in a relative safety and were able to breathe a sigh of relief. On the following morning Denys put his family on that bus to Warsaw. Since then, they have made it to Israel, and are re-united with their older daughter. It is both harder, and easier for him without them. Harder because he is missing them, and easier because he only has himself to worry about now, and he does not have any time for that…
After his family had left, he had to start looking for a job. He had overseen a Neonatal Intensive Care in Dnipro, and under his 12 years of leadership it had become (and still is, which is the testament to the system that he had put in place) the best in the country. He is a very well known, and respected anaesthetist and intensivist, but he was now a displaced person with no paperwork, no CV, no formal references required to apply for a job formally. Jobs were not being advertised in a “normal” way either – there were no “normal” ways anymore.
Denys went to a children’s hospital, and just popped into their anaesthetic department. “I need a job, any job. Perhaps, some shift work at the intensive care, or something. I would do whatever.” He was instantly recognised and was told to wait. Then he was told that the CEO of the hospital wanted to have a chat. He was accompanied to his office, where they did have a relatively short conversation about his previous experience in Dnipro. Then he was told to wait outside.
After he was called back the CEO told him:
“Denys, I have heard a lot about you, and I also liked what you said. I have two offers for you – Head of the Intensive Care, or Medical Director of the hospital, but you have to make a decision now. What is it going to be?”
“I think I will go for the role of Medical Director; I have been Head of ICU already”.
And so it happened – Denys has become the Medical Director of children’s hospital, which has now become the tertiary trauma centre accepting children from the East of the country, who suffered the most severe types of injuries.
Denys, what are the patients that you have treated that stand out, the ones that you keep thinking about? (L.K.)
“I don’t know. Maybe the 13-year-old with a shell fragment that entered his right lung through the base of his neck without injuring his heart, or major vessels. It had taken about 20 hours to get him to us. He was conscious with a chest drain in. We took him to theatre, did a keyhole surgery, and fished the fragment out of his chest. He has fully recovered and is home now. Well, not HIS home in the East, but at a home with his parents.”
The entry wound of a shell fragment at the base of the teenager’s neck, and a CT image showing the pathway of the shell fragment through the right lung, and the fragment itself at the bottom of the lung.
During keyhole surgery.
The fragment itself.
“Or the two ECMOs (extracorporeal oxygenation – where patient’s lungs are not ventilated, and heart is not beating, while their blood is circulated through a heart-lung machine) in Ukraine – one in a badly burned teenager; another one – the first ever in a neonate after a heart surgery when they could not wean him off a heart-lung machine in theatre. Both have survived.”
The first neonate in Ukraine on ECMO.
Denys, have you been involved with that famous 14-year-old girl, who was driven out of Mariupol by her parents, when their car got shot at by Russians. Her parents were badly injured, and she had to take over in spite of the fact that she was herself shot in her legs. (L.K.)
“Yes, I anaesthetised her, but it was not her parents, just some strangers who took her in. She was an orphan. An absolute savage! She managed to get everybody out to safety. Everyone in that car has survived.”
Do you have any pictures with her? (L.K.)
“Nah, I don’t like showing off. Besides, her anaesthetic was the most unexciting episode of her story…”
One of daily tragedies – Denys’ hospital is the major combat trauma centre accepting the most severely injured children from the East.
And this is the essence of the man – he does not feel a need to bask in anybody else’s glory. He has his own stories to tell. If you want to find out who you really are, try to lose everything, move to another place, and start over. Add some Russian bombs for an extra excitement. I did the first part without the bombs 20 years ago, and I can tell you that it was hard enough. There are a series of challenges along the way that test your stamina, character, and integrity, but with the horrors of war added in I cannot even imagine what it would be like, how I would have performed. I could only hope that I would be at least half as strong as Denys.
It was an absolute honour to get to know the man, and I hope you could appreciate the strength of his character as much as I have.