NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — For Hutchinson Clinic plastic surgeon Nataliya Biskup, it is vital that she use her gifts to help people in her native Ukraine in the face of conflict that makes it hard to get the care that is her specialty.
"I was born in Lviv, Ukraine, which is very western Ukraine," Biskup said. "It's about 40 miles away from the Polish border. I emigrated to the United States with my parents when I was eight years old. I specialize in reconstruction of head and neck, of all sorts of wounds in the body, as well as cosmetic and aesthetic surgery. When this war kicked off, for me, it was a very painful experience, because I still have family in Ukraine. It really affected me, very personally. I saw an opportunity to be able to contribute in some way, to help ease the suffering."
Her first trip was spent in October with a Canadian group called Face the Future fixing the faces of people scarred by the war. This last trip in February focused on younger patients.
"This particular trip was actually to my hometown of Lviv, working with children that have cleft and craniofacial anomalies and helping those children, helping in the reconstruction of more complex cases that doctors there are not routinely used to dealing with," Biskup said. "They are also, at this point, with so much effort dedicated to the war and the treatment of war-related injuries, a lot of the children in Ukraine are having difficulty with accessing care."
Biskup said being relatively far from the front lines allowed her to do much of her work as she normally would.
"There are missiles and drones and things that have been fired into that area," Biskup said. "Certainly, during operations, there have been air raid sirens that go off during the operation, but when a patient is there on the table and you're helping them, that's the main focus, so you just continue on."
Typically, in the United States, a child with a cleft lip and palate would get their lip repaired at about three months and their palate repaired at nine months, but she was dealing with kids that are three and four years old to do those treatments on the February trip.
"It definitely gets a little bit more complicated as the child does get older," Biskup said. "One additional issue is just the level of complexity of cases that the Ukrainian surgeons can do is a little bit less. They are really trying to learn on these trips. A big part of these trips is operating, but also educating the local surgeons."
The hope for Biskup is that the next time she goes back to Ukraine, she will be able to go in peace and begin to see in the lives of people the type of reconstruction that is her specialty with faces and bodies. In addition to her work in Hutchinson, Biskup also works at Wesley in Wichita.