The Surgeon

The Surgeon

By Brendan Hoffman

One minute they were treating patients. The next they were dismantling the remains of a children’s hospital hit by a Russian missile.

This is Dr. Ihor Kolodka. That is his own blood. He was hit by flying debris while operating on a young girl in Kyiv.

Brick by brick, people handed along remnants of the Ohmatdyt Children’s Hospital as rescue workers searched for survivors.

This is the building Dr. Kolodka was working in when the missile hit, sending shrapnel and shards of glass screaming through the rooms.

As volunteers helped clear the site, rescuers were able to pull at least three children from the rubble.

“I could not not help,” Dr. Kolodka said when we spoke hours after I photographed him helping remove debris from the missile strike in Ukraine on Monday. “It’s my hospital, my people. I’m a doctor.”

But first, he needed help himself.

Dr. Kolodka had been in the middle of performing cleft-lip surgery when the air-raid sirens went off at Ohmatdyt. Unable to stop working, the operating team plowed ahead — until the explosion.

His forehead lacerated, Dr. Kolodka went to a colleague to have the wound stitched up and then went outside to help, he told me in a phone conversation.

The hospital was hit during a large-scale Russian bombardment that killed at least 20 people in cities across Ukraine on Monday.

Russia said it had been targeting military facilities, but at the hospital, one doctor and another adult were killed, local officials said, and at least 16 other people were injured, seven of them children.

• A two-story medical building about 150 yards from the main hospital sustained the most extensive damage, with the structure completely collapsed.

When the sirens went off, medical workers placed those patients who could be moved into hallways, away from the windows.

But after the explosion, one doctor recalled seeing scores of “badly injured” people staggering through the halls. Images from inside the hospital showed bloodstained hallways, collapsed ceilings, and destroyed operating rooms. A woman could be seen carrying a small child covered in dust and blood near the entrance.

Dr. Kolodka, 30, who has worked at Ohmatdyt for a little over three years, said the infant girl he had been operating on was doing well.

In the end, though, the surgery had to be halted after the power went out. Doctors used a manual respirator to keep the girl breathing, and then she was moved to another hospital so the procedure could be completed.

Written by Eric Nagourney.