‘They can hear the explosions in the operating room’

The Irish-based charity Chernobyl Children International (CCI) has sent a 12-person team of paediatric surgeons and nurses to Ukraine to operate on children with life-threatening cardiac issues.

Established by Adi Roche in 1991 to give support and hope to children living in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear incident, the charity has been continuing its working treating children amid the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Last week, an international team of surgeons and doctors travelled to Lviv in west Ukraine via Krakow in Poland with cardiac equipment such as oxygenators.

The medics’ trips to Ukraine usually last several weeks with up to 20 children being operated on or treated during these periods, a spokeswoman for the charity said.

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Speaking to The Irish Times, the chief executive of the charity, Adi Roche, said that the existing equipment in the hospital when the group first arrived in Lviv was “second World War type equipment, very antiquated and out of date”.

The charity brought in new state-of-the-art surgical equipment and tools for the doctors to continue operating on young children despite the recent deadly missile attacks on the city.

“Sometimes they have had to continue operations with just headlamps” as a result of electricity outages during attacks on the cities, Ms Roche said. “They can hear the explosions in the operating room.”

The lead doctor for the mission, Dr Igor Polivinok, who left his home in Kharkiv following shelling of the hospital he was based in, said explosions can be heard in the distance.

“You can’t tell how close it is. We have experienced frequent bombardment but are not distracted by it,” Dr Polivinok said.

“Throughout the war, our medical teams have continued to operate on babies and children who have been born with severe congenital heart defects, including Chernobyl Heart, as a result of radiation.”

Chernobyl Heart, which is also known as Ebstein’s anomaly, “is a heart defect where a child is born with multiple holes in their heart”, Ms Roche explained. The charity’s team is able to operate and treat this condition as a result of equipment donated by Irish hospitals.

The group’s lead surgeon, Dr Bill Novick, said: “These innocent children are on the front line of two humanitarian crises – first the Chernobyl accident and now the war.

“Since our team has arrived in Ukraine over the weekend, these children have put their tiny hearts in our hands, and we try to make a miracle happen.”

The CCI team was originally based in Kharkiv but was forced to leave a significant amount of equipment behind when the war in Ukraine began. A lot of the equipment was “very large” so it was not possible to move it to the hospital in Lviv.

The surgical team only left at the last chance after performing operations in bomb bunkers when attacks on the city began, before getting the “last train out of Kharkiv”, the charity said.