I found this article in my travels today. Ukraine is not just a news story that touches us for a moment and then gets lost in our daily lives. People – real people – are suffering and working in the middle of a war. This touched me so much I had tears in my eyes. May these people be blessed and the fighting stop.
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“The heavy door to the staff lounge swings shut behind me, muting the familiar hospital sounds into a distant hum. I lean against it for a second, letting out a breath I feel like I’ve been holding for two hours. It’s done.
The boy is fourteen. His name is _____. He took a bad fall off his bike trying to avoid a pothole—a story as old as time, yet now forever tied to this specific pothole on a Kharkiv street. A displaced supracondylar fracture of the humerus. Nasty, but clean. In the OR, under the bright lights, it was just anatomy. A puzzle of bone fragments, vessels, and nerves that needed careful restoration. My hands moved with a practiced calm—reduction, temporary fixation, the precise placement of K-wires under the C-arm’s silent blue glow. Everything here, in this operating room, is fine. Controllable. Logical.
I pour a cup of lukewarm, strong tea from the ever-present pot. My body aches with the familiar fatigue of focused tension. Looking out the small window, the sky over Kyiv is a deep twilight blue. Peaceful. It’s a dissonant sight. My mind, still buzzing from the concentration of surgery, now fills with the other, louder reality.
I operated on a 14-year-old boy today. A simple childhood accident. But for a moment, when they wheeled him in, my heart clenched with a different, colder fear. It wasn’t the shape of the fracture that caused it; it was his age. Fourteen. The same age as the boy from Mariupol we treated last spring, brought in with a wound that was not from any bicycle. The age of the kids growing up too fast in basements, their childhoods measured in air raid sirens and the sound of distant impacts.
This is our duality now. We are orthopedic surgeons in Ukraine. We still treat the slipped discs, the arthritic knees, the sports injuries of ordinary life that stubbornly persist. We mend the simple fractures of boys being boys. But layered over that, like a persistent shadow, is the other medicine. The medicine of shrapnel, of blast injuries, of complex trauma from forces that have nothing to do with gravity or bad luck, and everything to do with war.
Today, I am grateful it was just a bike. Today, my skill was used to ensure _____ will have full function in his arm, to play, to write, to hug his mother without pain. A small, complete victory. In a few weeks, he’ll be complaining about physiotherapy, and I will scold him with a smile. A normal, beautiful thing.
I finish the tea, the bitterness sharp on my tongue. The pager on my hip is silent for now. I’ll go check on him in recovery soon, speak to his anxious parents with the confident, reassuring tone we’ve all mastered.
But first, I allow myself this minute of stillness by the window. I think of my colleagues in the East, in the cities closer to the front, where their ORs have no respite from that other kind of trauma. Their stamina is superhuman. We support them as we can, sending supplies, sharing complex case advice over secure chats.
Everything here, in this moment, is fine. The operation was a success. The city outside is quiet tonight. My hands, which just set a young bone straight, are steady.
I take another deep breath and square my shoulders. The fatigue is still there, but it’s a good fatigue. The kind that comes from fixing something that can be fixed. A small piece of the world, put right. In the morning, there will be more patients. Both kinds. We will be here for them all.”
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Message from a Ukrainian Orthopedic Surgeon
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