“I used to be a surgeon, now I’m a butcher”

Suddenly, the storm arrives on four wheels and the chirping of the crickets is buried by the noise of the engine of a truck from which two wounded soldiers quickly get out. One of them is blindfolded and has to rely on his companions to reach the stretcher that is waiting for him in the garage of the house, where a improvised operating roomThere, several doctors are already treating the other soldier’s injuries.

The garage doors are quickly closed again to allow the light from the surgical lamp does not reveal the position of the shelter in the face of possible Russian drones searching for signs of activity in the area.

Their wounds are minor compared to those seen in the context of this war, where The vast majority of deaths occur at the hands of drones and gliding bombs: they have more or less deep cuts all over their bodies due to the shrapnel generated by the fall of a FAB500 projectile near their position.

These are, so to speak, the lucky ones because they were able to wait until nightfall, but two of their colleagues, who were much more seriously injured in the same explosion, had to be urgently and exceptionally evacuated in the morning.

In that case, the Shrapnel severed one of the soldiers’ legs at the knee.The other’s injuries, although not so obvious, were enough to end his life after the doctors removed the tourniquet from his arm, bathing the floor of the premises in blood.

Not a single lament was heard for the loss of that life, just as no one could have said that they knew him. Death is part of your everyday lifeis not the first soldier to die in this garage and will not be the last. Once the body is removed, efforts are concentrated on amputating the leg of the first.

By the end, Juja, a dog that was rescued a few weeks ago In the Serebrianskii forest, he walks between the legs of doctors, who relax while smoking and joking next to the amputee, waiting for the ambulance to arrive that will take him to a hospital in the city.

The main promoter of humor to relax the atmosphere is Vitaly Mykhailovych Kalendinone of the doctors who voluntarily joined the army at the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022. Prior to his enlistment, he worked in the department of abdominal surgery from the Multidisciplinary Clinical Hospital No. 17 in Kharkiv.

“I used to be a surgeon, now I’m a butcher,” Vitaliy jokes. His clear eyes know what he is talking about when he says that “you can’t do this job without a bit of humour”. His work clothes confirm his philosophy: flip-flops and swimming trunks.

To Vitaliy’s son, who now lives with his ex-wife, He was baptized with the name Victor after being born in the summer of 2014a few months after the start of the Donbas war. “We thought it would be an appropriate name for a child born in a war,” Vitaliy adds, looking through the photos of him on his phone.

Victor, who recently turned 10, is an only child, but It’s like having war as a sisterbecause with her he must share the valuable resource of time that his father has in limited quantities.

Video calls often

“Sometimes we see each other every week, other times It may take several months“It depends on how far I am from Kharkiv, but we often make video calls,” Vitaliy explains with a smile that tries to hide his resignation.

Day after day, wounded soldiers pass through Vitaliy’s hands at the rate that flies fall on the sticky traps hanging all over the houseIn this position, doctors treat all kinds of physical injuries, but they can do little about the psychological damage that comes with going through such a traumatic situation.

That’s when, a couple of months later, the post-traumatic stress syndrome becomes the new enemy to defeat for many of these soldiers once they withdraw from the front.