Svitlana Zinko never imagined that a simple fumble down the stairs would eventually land her in a New York City hospital bed 5,000 miles away from her home in Ukraine—with her life in the hands of a Russian surgeon.
The 53-year-old schoolteacher was at home with her husband and two cats in Ivano-Frankivsk, a western Ukrainian town near Lviv, when an air raid siren started blasting around midnight. In a rush to get to the basement shelter, she tripped down the stairs and broke her clavicle—an injury that would ultimately lead a painful, life-threatening infection to spread through her body.
“We both were shocked,” Svitlana told The Daily Beast in an interview through a translator, recalling that night on June 17. “My husband called an ambulance, but they told us that this fracture is not important because they have many other calls. We were waiting until 6 a.m. to be taken to the hospital.”
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When she finally reached the hospital, Ukrainian doctors scheduled Svitlana for a surgery that included implanting a plate to stabilize her collarbone. It wasn’t long after the operation when Svitlana realized something was seriously wrong: the site of the incision began oozing out puss, and she developed severe back pain that persisted even after a second surgery was done to remove the plate in her collarbone.
After months of mixed diagnoses, MRI tests, and excruciating pain, Zinko’s daughter Liliia—who lives in New York City—finally succeeded in making arrangements for her parents to be relocated to the U.S., in hopes that her mother could find a solution to her dire medical crisis in an American hospital.
“She never wanted to leave Ukraine,” Liliia told The Daily Beast, but she “decided after the 7th MRI, that if the diagnosis was bad, we need to move now… so on Sept. 28, I ordered a ticket for her and my father, and on Oct. 13, they left for the U.S.—with the cats too.”
By the time Svitlana reached the office of Dr. Garrett Leonard, an orthopedic surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, the infection from her clavicle surgery had spread to her spine, and she was in terrible shape.
“I saw X-rays that showed significant destruction to one of the bones in her spine… we saw the infection was extremely aggressive,” Leonard told The Daily Beast. “That put her at great risk of paralysis. With an untreated infection too, that could potentially be a cause for death. At any moment, she could have been paralyzed, and at any moment, she could have become septic from her infection.”
Just days after her first appointment at Lenox Hill on Dec. 2, Svitlana was scheduled for a two-part surgery led by Leonard, with the goals of clearing as much of the infection in her back as possible, taking pressure off of her spinal cord, and stabilizing her spine. Leonard, however, needed help to access the damaged parts of Svitlana’s spine in the safest way possible.
That’s where Russian general surgeon Dr. Sergei Dolgopolov came in.
“Dr. Leonard contacted me and asked me for help in a difficult case,” said Dolgopolov, who trained in a military hospital in Moscow before moving to the U.S in 1993. “Obviously, I’m an opponent of the war, and an opponent of this aggression and all that it does to Ukraine. That’s the normal reaction—to help contribute a little bit. I felt like at least I could do something.”
Dolgopolov became part of a multinational team of doctors—including a Ukrainian surgical tech—who treated Svitlana.
The Russian surgeon was tasked with creating an incision in between Svitlana’s ribs, moving her organs out of the way to provide Leonard with access to Svitlana’s spine—which would require the general surgeon to deflate, and later inflate, one of her lungs—all while making sure her organs aren’t injured in the process. Leonard would then scrape out the infection by removing the damaged tissue and bones, and stabilize the spine with metal reinforcements. He’d then perform a separate, second surgery to further support her spine with a metal rod and screws.
Both surgeries were performed flawlessly, to the gratitude of Svitlana, who has since regained her mobility and is now living her life pain-free thanks to efforts of Leonard and Dolgopolov. “I really appreciate all the doctors in New York that helped me, because the situation in Ukraine is still severe and complicated,” she said.
Vicious Cycle
For Dolgopolov, who worked in Moscow during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the experience of treating Svitlana was a reminder that “history goes in circles.” He recalled leaving Moscow all those years ago after having to “to tell patients to bring their own material, like gauze. You have no idea, that’s how bad it was… I felt like the country was completely falling apart and that it would never recover or get better.”
The surgeon, who still has family in Russia, told The Daily Beast that the invasion of Ukraine made him “feel like I didn’t know my country, I didn’t know my people. That was my feeling after a year of the war… especially being raised on this myth of Soviet liberators, unfortunately this myth completely disappears when you hear about all this horrifying acts of raping and murdering civilians.”
“I hope that this misery stops soon,” he added. “This is probably the only thing I want, that the war could be stopped and people stop from being killed and dying. That’s the only thing I think of.”
For Leonard, however, Svitlana’s story offers some glimmer of hope. “When I was in the operating room, it struck me how remarkable it was,” he said. “There’s this terrible war going on between Russia and Ukraine, but in that operating room there are individuals from those countries who are working to cure a life-threatening infection. We had Dr. Dolgopolov, we had a Ukrainian surgical tech there. I’m very lucky to work with such individuals at the hospital.”
Despite the trauma of the war, Svitlana and her family have nothing but gratitude for the doctors in New York who gave her her life back—including Dolgopolov, who was “always positive and smiling,” the schoolteacher said.
“She was already trying to look for a dress for her funeral. So we’re really thankful,” Svitlana’s son-in-law, Vitali Tryhubenko, told The Daily Beast.
Vitali—who left Ukraine in the early months of the war, a few days after his wife and daughter fled—explained that a Russian friend of his had actually picked his family up from the airport when they first arrived in the U.S., and even gave them money to get by.
For now, Svitlana is far away from the terrors of war. She’s been enjoying walks in Central Park, visiting historic churches around the city, and spending time with her 5-year-old granddaughter, Alice.
Still, the family has Ukraine in their minds “everyday when we wake up. I don’t have any friends that aren’t on the frontlines,” Vitali said. “Each family has lost something there: a house, a neighbor, a mother. It’s been a whole year. Everyone has sacrificed a lot. So in the end, we have to win. We’ve already lost so many people. We can’t lose.”
