WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 05th May, 2022) A group of pediatric cardiologists from the US-based Cardiac Alliance plans to conduct several surgeries in Lviv in June unless western Ukraine becomes a hotbed of hostilities, the group's leader William Novick told Sputnik.
"I am not sure that everything will work out well, but if it does, we will be in Lviv on June 5," Novick said, adding that the Cardiac Alliance plans to ship several boxes with medical and surgical supplies to the city by the end of next week.
Novick said the Ukrainian counterparts have a plan in place for the team to operate on seven children in June, but noted that he is expecting several additional patients.
"We have seven kids and we may operate on more," he said.
Novick noted that his team may cancel the upcoming trip only if western Ukraine becomes a real "hot spot" in the� current conflict. He also expressed doubt that colleagues from other Ukrainian cities, where the team operated on patients in previous years, will ask them to come now.
"They are pretty reasonable. The guys from Kiev told us that it is probably not smart to go to Kiev, and the guys in Kharkiv certainly do not think it is a good idea to come over there, so I do not think anybody is going to ask that we come there. Everybody knows that we are trying to focus on building up the program in Lviv," he said.
The Cardiac Alliance began establishing a pediatric heart surgery project in Lviv last year, as there were no such programs in the entire western Ukraine at that time, and children and their parents had to travel to Kiev and other parts of the country in order to get relevant treatment.
"We have made a trip in November of 2021, in January of this year. This was a part of our overall plans to build a pediatric cardiac surgery program in Lvov," Novick said.
Just several weeks after completing their regular visit in January and February, Novick and some of his colleagues had to return back to Lviv in mid-March to operate on several patients in case of urgent treatment.
"We went because the surgeon we were training in Lvov called me in the end of February and in the beginning of March, saying that there were a number of critically-ill newborns� that his team was not comfortable operating on and could not be sent to Kiev. He asked, could we put a team together and come in to Lviv and operate on. That is what we did," Novick said.
During the week-long trip, the team operated on six children, including three newborns of eight days, nine days and 17 days old, Novick said.
"All these children have been discharged from the hospital, and last I heard, all children were fine," he said.
Novick, who performs surgeries throughout the world, usually calls the youngest patients surviving the most complex surgeries - "miracle children." He recalled operating on one such child in Yugoslavia during the NATO bombing campaign of that country in 1999.
"He is 22 years old now, and I would say, these six children in Lviv have similar circumstances to that child," Novick said.
When asked to compare the two trips in terms of the security risk involved, Novick said the visit to Lviv in March was nothing like the much more risky trip to Belgrade in March of 1999.
"There is really no comparison about the intensity of the situations when you compare Lviv to Belgrade. No comparison," he said.
Novick recalled an even more dangerous experience when he and his team were trapped in Benghazi, Libya, in May of 2014.
"The civil war erupted, and our hospital was in a no-man's zone, there were mortars and rocket fire going over the hospital from one side to the other side. We were literally sitting in the strip of land between the two fighting forces," he said.
The hospital was not struck while the team of doctors was there, but it was bombed two weeks later, Novick said.
"In Benghazi, they had negotiated a ceasefire for one hour, so we could get out of the hospital because the road we were going to travel on to get out of the city was a contested road that both sides were fighting over actively," Novick added.
The Cardiac Alliance is comprised of medical specialists from different countries who usually work in "hot spots" around the world. The team has been working in Ukraine for many years.
