True Story

KGOU

“The sound was the first thing that hit me. Not the thunder of artillery, though that was a constant, grumbling backdrop. It was the screaming. A high sound that cut through the dusty air of the clinic. I was a surgeon, but out here, in this makeshift hospital in a reclaimed school basement in eastern Ukraine, I was everything. And that scream meant someone’s world had just ended.

I threw down the clamp I was sterilizing and ran. The corridor was a labyrinth of sandbags and pale, scared faces. Our volunteer driver, Dmytro, was stumbling through the entrance, his face ashen. In his arms, he carried a woman, her clothes dark with blood.

“Doctor! Doctor, please! The market… the shell hit the market!”

He laid her on the first gurney we had, a creaking hospital hand-me-down from the 80s. I saw everything at once. The unmistakable swell of her pregnant belly, maybe seven or eight months along. The shrapnel wound in her shoulder, which was bleeding badly but was manageable. And then I saw her legs, the pool of blood rapidly spreading beneath her.

This wasn’t her blood. This was the baby’s.

“Operating room! Now!” I yelled, my voice a foreign, sharp thing in my own ears. “Nadiya! Prep for an emergency C-section! Maximum units of O-neg, go!”

My hands were moving before my brain fully caught up. We had no real operating room, just a storage room we’d scrubbed clean and flooded with surgical lights. No perfect anaesthesia, just ketamine and vigilance. No team of specialists, just me, Nadiya our fierce, experienced nurse, and a terrified young paramedic named Oleksiy.

The woman, her name was Oksana, her papers said. She was conscious, her eyes wide with a primal fear. Not for herself, but for the life inside her.

“My baby,” she whispered, her voice a dry rasp. “Please. Don’t let my baby die.”

I held her hand for a second. It was cold. “My name is Alex. We are going to fight for you both. But I need you to fight with me. Can you do that?”

She gave a tiny, desperate nod. Nadiya slid in the IV, her movements sure and swift. The distant crump of another explosion shook the building, dust sifting from the ceiling tiles onto our sterile field.

We couldn’t move her to a proper hospital. She wouldn’t survive the journey. It had to be here. Now.

The ketamine took the edge off her pain, but she was still with us. I made the first incision. A Pfannenstiel incision, the same one I’d made hundreds of times in my clean, quiet hospital back home. This was nothing like that. This was blood, and urgency, and the muffled thud of war outside our door.

Oleksiy held the retractors, his hands shaking. “Steady,” I muttered, more to myself than to him. I worked blindly for a moment, my fingers finding their way by touch and memory. The uterus. The source of the bleeding. A piece of shrapnel, no bigger than my thumbnail, had pierced the uterine wall.

I got the bleeding under control as best I could. There was no time for finesse. I had to get the baby out. I extended the incision into the uterus. The amniotic fluid gushed out, mixing with the blood. And then, I saw it. A tiny, perfect foot.

A footling breech. Of course. Nothing about this was going to be easy.

I reached in, my heart hammering against my ribs. I found the other foot. The cord, I could feel it pulsing—a frantic, beautiful sign of life. With infinite care, I began to guide the baby out. Hips, shoulders, and then the head, delivered slowly to prevent injury.

And then, a tiny, limp body was in my hands. A boy. Covered in vernix and blood. Silent.

The world stopped. The shelling, the shouting, the smell of antiseptic and copper—it all faded away. There was only this silent child in my palms.

“Come on, little one,” I whispered. I tilted him slightly, clearing his airway with a bulb syringe. I rubbed his back firmly with a sterile gauze. Nothing.

Oksana was watching, tears streaming down her face into the surgical drape. “Please,” she breathed again.

I bent down and covered his tiny mouth and nose with my own. I gave two gentle puffs of air. I felt his chest rise and fall.

I did it again.

And then, the most beautiful sound I have ever heard filled that bloody, desperate room. A thin, reedy, indignant cry. It was a sound of pure life, a protest against the cold and the shock. The sound of a soul declaring itself.

I placed the squalling, wriggling boy on Oksana’s chest. Nadiya was already there, covering him with a warm towel. Oksana’s good arm came up to hold him, a look of such profound relief and love on her face that it felt like a physical force in the room. It pushed back the darkness.

My work wasn’t done. I turned back to Oksana, to repair the damage to her uterus, to tend to her shoulder. My hands were still steady, but now they were filled with a quiet, humming energy. The energy from that cry.

Hours later, I sat outside on a broken step, the night air cold on my face. The fighting had moved further east, the thunder now just a distant grumble. I was exhausted, drained to my very core. My scrubs were stiff with dried blood.

Dmytro came and sat beside me. He handed me a chipped mug of hot, sweet tea.

“The mother?” he asked.

“She’ll be fine. Strong woman. They both will be.”

He nodded, sipping his own tea. We sat in silence for a while. Then he looked at me, a question in his tired eyes.

“Why do you do it, Doc? Why are you here?”

I looked down at my hands. The hands that had held a dying woman and delivered her son into a world at war. They were just hands. A doctor’s hands.

I thought of Oksana’s face. I thought of that cry.

“For that,” I said quietly. “For the chance to bring something into this world that isn’t destruction. Just for that one sound.”

And in the darkness of a broken city, with the taste of dust and tea in my mouth, that felt like enough.”

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This is a true story. When I read it, I simply sat, so moved, all by myself in my place, tears in my eyes. This is one story. It has a happy ending, thank goodness, but this is happening in so many places in our world – the ending maybe not so happy. Wonderful doctors and nurses are putting everything on the line, doing the very best they can under horrendous conditions, to try to do good in a world full of violence. There is no pay high enough. They do this because their hearts force them to use their skills when others would be running in the opposite direction. There is no way to thank them for this labor of love. They work when they are so tired it’s amazing they can stand up, much less perform life saving surgeries. They work when they are hungry, when they have to be scared out of their wits with bombs going off all around them. They work when the outcomes are not good, when there was simply nothing they could do, and then go on to try to help someone else.

I’m so thankful to these men and women. I’m proud to share this post with you. I want you to read and feel and absorb, and then hope you will share it wherever you can so that people are aware that people are living and dying in places all over our beautiful world. Please don’t forget that. Don’t get so caught up in the details of your world that you forget the wonderful things that are happening in the midst of violence and hatred. Do whatever you can to support these medical people, plus the military people in the middle of harm’s way, as well. Thank you.