From his pocket, Serhiy Melnyk pulls out a small rusty shard, wrapped neatly in paper. He holds it up. "It grazed my kidney, pierced my lung, and my heart," says the Ukrainian serviceman quietly.
Traces of dried blood are still visible on the shrapnel from a Russian drone that became lodged in his heart while he was fighting in eastern Ukraine. Untreated, Serhiy's injury would have been fatal.
Cardiovascular surgeon Serhiy Maksymenko shows footage of the metal fragment trapped in Serhiy's beating heart before it is delicately removed by a thin magnet-tipped device. In just one year, Doctor Maksymenko's team has performed over 70 successful heart operations with the device, which has changed the face of front-line medicine in Ukraine. |