There are no civilian flights into Ukraine, so he flew into Poland and crossed the border with a local doctor from Lviv who doubles as a long-distance ambulance driver.
Lviv, a city of 700,000, is in the western part of the country and has largely been spared, but not completely.
“We were driving overnight to Tuesday morning to Lviv and on that Monday night, the Russians attacked an automobile and tire shop, in addition to a couple of military targets,” he said. “They attacked that civilian target and basically completely destroyed it. There were a couple of young male employees there, ready to go to work that morning and they were like sitting in the break room when that happened.”
Middle-age Ukrainian men are not usually allowed to leave the country, but Davis’ doctor friend has a special pass to come and go.
“He and his wife are physicians,” Davis said. “They actually run a children’s outpatient center right next to the children’s hospital in Lviv. They’ve basically taken their ambulances and turned them into this kind of transport that brings supplies in and transports patients out.”
His friend’s pass got them through the border checkpoint with minimal delays.
“There’s a very long line at the border, actually on both sides; a long line to get into Ukraine and much longer to get out of Ukraine,” Davis said.
Most of those waiting to enter the country are aid workers with all the supplies they can carry — “cars that were full of boxes and bags and stuff in the back of the vehicle,” he said.
The entire medical system of Ukraine has become like a cross-country relay race, transporting patients west from the eastern and southern areas of the country where the fighting is heaviest.
The patient load is a mix of soldiers and civilians wounded in the fighting and people with ordinary but serious medical problems that Ukraine has neither the time nor capability to treat now.
Doctors in the east stabilize patients as best they can and send them by ambulance to Lviv, about 1,200 miles, a distance comparable to driving from Wichita to Cleveland.
Doctors in Lviv take over and do what they can, and ship the worst-off patients to hospitals in Poland, Germany, Austria and other western countries.
Davis arranged such a transport for one seriously ill individual and rode with him most of the way.
In Wichita, if he needed to send a patient to Houston for advanced treatment, he could pick up the phone and it would happen.
In Ukraine, he couldn’t transport the patient until he’d rounded up all the scarce medical supplies, food and water that the man would need to survive a 12-hour ride to Germany.
It gave him a new appreciation for the resources he has at St. Francis, where when he needs something to treat an emergency patient, he either gets it out of the supply closet or asks someone to go get it for him.
