The surgeries were some of the most complex Dr. Nataliya Biskup had ever done.
But that wasn’t the most difficult part of the Wichita doctor’s recent trip to Ukraine, where she helped operate on soldiers wounded in the country’s war with Russia.
“Actually seeing the physical repercussions of the war was very, very hard,” Biskup said. “It made the trip very emotional.”
Biskup, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon at the Hutchinson Clinic and Wesley Children’s Hospital, is Ukrainian-American. She was born in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv and emigrated to the U.S. with her family as a child.
When fighting broke out in Ukraine in 2014, she started thinking about how she could use her medical expertise to support her home country. That only intensified in 2022 when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“You always feel very helpless. You’re just one person in the face of this huge, cataclysmic event,” she said. “It really motivated me to want to go help.”
Biskup got involved with the Canadian organization Face the Future, which was planning its second medical mission trip to Ukraine.
In October, she and three of her staff flew from Wichita to Chicago where they then boarded a second plane to Warsaw, Poland. From there, they chartered a bus to take them over the border with Ukraine to the city of Ivano-Frankivsk.
The trip, which Biskup said would ordinarily take around five hours, ended up taking around 11 hours due to a holdup at the border.
Once they arrived at the local hospital, Biskup and a small group of other surgeons led an educational symposium for Ukrainian surgeons focused on treating complex war injuries to the head and neck.
Then, they began seeing patients. Before the trip, the team had reviewed dozens of cases of patients who had sustained major head and neck injuries during combat. Over the course of four days, they performed surgeries on more than 30 patients, working from early in the morning until late at night.
“There’s lots of blast injuries to the face,” Biskup said. “On top of bones being in the wrong place, there’s bones missing. There’s pieces of nose missing; pieces of lip missing.”
The soldiers came from across Ukraine. Most had had their wounds stabilized on the war’s frontlines but required more specialized care. Sometimes wounds had begun to heal incorrectly, further complicating treatment.
Biskup said the work was among the most technically challenging she’d encountered in her career so far — and among the most rewarding.
“[It] really pushed me as a surgeon to innovate and to be my best,” she said.
