Recently, our team performed an extremely complex operation on 87-year-old Kim Pylypovich. Imagine: a person is almost 90 years old, yet he is ready to fight for her health and the joy of life!
The team of the Heart Institute performed a successful heart transplant at the Zaporizhzhia Regional Clinical Hospital. This is already the 104th heart transplant of the team in the last three years.
During the week, doctors improved their professional skills, got acquainted with new approaches in cardiac surgery and transplantology, and studied the experience of Turkish colleagues in conducting minimally invasive operations.
A few years ago, each of these operations was an event, and people excitedly followed the work of the doctors, the courage of the patients, and the greatness of the decision of the donors’ families with sinking hearts.
Doctors from the Heart Institute presented our experience in using extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO). Head of the scientific Department of Kidney Transplantation and Hemodialysis, PhD, Anesthesiologist Stepan Maruniak, made a report analyzing the main features of our ECMO center’s work during war.
Our mission was to remind the world of the challenging times our country is going through and the conditions under which medicine operates during Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine and everyone witnessed the price we pay for this.
At the largest cardiac hospital in Canada, the Toronto General Hospital (Peter Munk Cardiac Center), the training was conducted under the guidance of the legendary cardiac surgeon, Dr. Tyrone David. In the American clinic Cedars-Sinai, the mentor was the brilliant Dr. Joanna Chikwe.
For this transplantation, the donor’s heart traveled a distance of over 300 km, which our team covered in just under 4 hours. In a groundbreaking move for Ukraine, we implemented the new Stanford technique, allowing for extended preservation and transportation time for the donor organ.
The conference represents a significant step in strengthening the community of specialized departments and continuous professional development for physicians involved in various aspects of functional diagnostics.
This internship was made possible through close collaboration between the administration of the Heart Institute and the French government, and upon the invitation of Dr. Mykola Myroshnyk, co-founder of the French-Ukrainian School of Advanced Doppler Echocardiography.