Russian doctors stayed behind in a burning hospital to complete open-heart surgery on a patient after a fire broke out on the roof while they were operating.
It took firefighters over two hours to put out the blaze in the city of Blagoveshchensk. Using fans to keep smoke out of the operating room where a group of eight doctors and nurses was working on the patient, they also ran a power cable in to keep it supplied with electricity.
The heart bypass operation was finished in two hours before removing the patient to another site, the emergencies ministry said.
“There’s nothing else we could do. We had to save the person. We did everything at the highest level,” surgeon Valentin Filatov was quoted as saying by REN TV.
According to the ministry, when the fire broke out on the roof, 128 people were immediately evacuated from the hospital, which is extremely old. There were no reported injuries.
“The clinic was built more than a century ago, in 1907, and the fire spread like lightning through the wooden ceilings of the roof,” the ministry said. The fire was believed to have been started by a short circuit. The hospital is the only one in the region with a specialist cardiological unit.
“A bow to the medics and firefighters,” said the local regional governor, Vasiliy Orlov.
Source: Reuters
