“You Are Not Alone:” The American Surgeons Helping Ukraine’s Wounded Warriors

Inside an operating room in Lviv’s St. Luke’s Hospital, the patient is Ukrainian, the music is British folk rock, and the lead surgeon is an American. 

Dr. Warren Schubert is one of several US medical experts whom Frontliner documented treating Ukrainians through an initiative of the Christian Medical Association of Ukraine.  

Schubert’s patient today is Serhiy, a former soldier whose armored personnel carrier was struck by a Russian anti-tank missile in the summer of 2023. “I was on fire,” Serhiy recalled to Frontliner, “my comrade pulled me out of the vehicle.”

 

Serhiy suffered severe burns and lost one eye in the strike. Despite undergoing treatment in Germany, he still requires complex plastic surgery. Schubert and Ukrainian surgeon Ivan Ryk explain to the wounded man that part of his treatment will require temporarily closing his one remaining eye, rendering him sightless for a week. Serhiy sighs, but agrees to the procedure. 

Schubert and Ryk operate meditatively, communicating with short remarks, or giving instructions to the nurse. As the pair work, interns watch carefully from over the surgeons’ shoulders. The delicate operation, to transplant a patch of skin from Serhiy’s thigh to his lower eyelid, lasts around two hours. 

After the operation, Schubert and Ryk retire to an office to discuss other patients. The pair study an MRI scan of a wounded soldier’s head. Schubert points out a missing portion of the man’s brain, lost to a fragment of shrapnel. 

“I’m surprised he communicates and functions as well as he does,” Schubert comments, “although, in my country, he could run for president,” he adds. The joke draws laughter from doctors gathered around the computer screen. 

Schubert is here in part, he says, due to his frustrations over Washington’s current policy towards Kyiv. 

“I think this is shameful the lack of aid the US has been giving to Ukraine,” the surgeon says. “For six months the republicans didn’t send anything, this is just criminal how we have broken every treaty that we have signed with Ukraine.”

The last time he felt so strongly about his government’s conduct, Schubert says, was during the war in Vietnam.

The American walks out to the verandah that overlooks the courtyard of the hospital. Among the fir trees, veterans of the current war in wheelchairs, or hobbling on crutches are dotted throughout the grounds. Dozens of  wounded Ukrainians pass through this facility every day. Schubert knows that his involvement here is a drop in the ocean amid the largest conflict in Europe since World War II but, he says, he cannot sit idly by. 

Ukrainian Doctors Are Learning – So Are The Americans

At the St. Nicholas Pediatric Hospital on the outskirts of Lviv, young patients with complex medical issues from across Ukraine are treated. Here, American surgeons James Suen and Stephen Orten spent a week working alongside Ukrainian doctors to study individual cases and select children for surgery. 

Orten already has experience working in wartime Ukraine. He was here in the summer of 2022 during some of the darkest and most chaotic weeks of the Russian invasion. The presence of American surgeons then, he says, became a powerful symbol of solidarity. Ukrainian doctors he recalls, “said that our coming gave them hope and inspiration, and you thought you were all alone in the world, and you’re not alone.”

James Suen, 84, specializes in head and neck surgery. In his half-century of practice, he has treated patients including former US President Bill Clinton and Hollywood director Steven Spielberg. He was inspired to come to Ukraine by Orten, his former student. 

Today the Americans’ patient is a seven-year-old boy with alopecia. After the child is anesthetized, he is covered with a sterile cloth, then doctors and interns cluster around the operating table. In the middle of the darkened room, the child’s head is spotlit under the operating lamp.

Orten makes the first incision with a cauterizing instrument and smoke curls through the surgeon’s gloved hands. The operating room smells of burnt skin.

During this surgery, hairless skin on the boy’s head is being removed and replaced with healthy skin from elsewhere on the boy’s body. 

The operation is being watched over by Igor Vyshpinsky, an experienced paediatric surgeon, and several interns. Although the American experts have come to share techniques with their Ukrainian counterparts, they admit that they are also picking up new knowledge.  

“We’re learning things here that we didn’t even know about. We’ll definitely pass them on when we get home,” Orten says.

Through the week of the Reconstruction Mission initiative, American surgeons spent a combined total of 115 hours in operating rooms. They are returning home to Texas, California, and Minnesota but are already planning to reunite. 

The mission was organized by the Christian Medical Association of Ukraine in partnership with Leap Global Mission and Razom for Ukraine.

Author: Diana Delyurman

Story adapted into English by Amos Chapple

 

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