Children of war: Doctors' mission to rescue severely burned Ukrainian kids

BOSTON — Taras Semenuk was burned before war came to Ukraine, before the air raid sirens began to sing, before the bombs dropped and the gunfire flew.  

It happened on a free-wheeling November day in 2021, when Taras and a friend came upon an old train station in the western Ukrainian city of Dubno, where he lives. 

Curious, Taras climbed atop an out-of-service train car. He didn't know there was a live, high-voltage power line over his head. Though he didn't make contact with it, he came close enough for 27,000 volts of electricity to surge through his 12-year-old body. 

It nearly killed him.

"In Ukraine, my son had six surgeries," his mother, Oksana Semenuk, told the Detroit Free Press, a part of the Paste BN Network, with the help of a translator. "His clothing was stuck to the skin; doctors tried to remove that."

More than 80% of his body was burned and it was clear, Semenuk said, that Taras needed more help than he could get at the hospital in Ukraine.

"The tragic news widely spread over there," she said in early May while sitting in the kitchen of Philoxenia House, medical housing provided by the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Boston, where she and Taras stayed as he underwent treatment for his burns at Shriners Children's across town. 

"I received many messages from unknown people who had been in the similar situations. One lady wrote me about the doctor in the U.S.A., in Boston, who can help my son."

That doctor was Gennadiy Fuzaylov, who grew up in the former Soviet Union and fled to the U.S. with his family decades ago.  

An assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Shriners Children's Boston, Fuzaylov has made it his life's mission to help burned children from Ukraine,  the former Soviet republic now embroiled in a brutal war with Russia that has stretched into its fourth month.

Much of that work is done through a nonprofit organization he founded, Doctors Collaborating to Help Children, which for a dozen years has made medical mission trips to Ukraine to treat children with serious burn injuries.

The most serious cases are brought to the U.S. for treatment. 

It was with Fuzaylov's help and through the network he has built that Taras and his mother came to Boston, where Shriners Children's is providing his care for free.

Over the course of six days, Fuzaylov consulted with physicians in Ukraine to assess the boy's condition, won approval from Shriners Children's to provide his medical care, secured travel visas for Taras and his mother and hired an air ambulance to bring them to Boston.

"It was Thanksgiving when he flew here," said Fuzaylov, who met at the hospital along with Dr. Robert Sheridan, a surgeon and director of the burn unit at Shriners Children's Boston. 

Despite being in excruciating pain, and knowing how seriously he'd been injured, Taras, who loves to tell jokes, still found a way to laugh. 

"Before I put him to sleep, he told me, 'Gennadiy, I always dreamed to come to the United States, but I couldn’t dream to come on a private jet,' " Fuzaylov said. "He had a sense of humor before I anesthetized him."

Taras was placed in a medically induced coma while doctors performed surgery on his burns multiple times a week over the course of several months.

"Most of my kids, they’re incredible, talented, big-hearted people and this is the reason why I engage with them for a long time."

What happens to the children of war?

When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in late February, Fuzaylov's thoughts turned to the thousands of Ukrainian children he'd cared for over a dozen years of medical missions with volunteer doctors from Doctors Collaborating to Help Children.

Were they safe? How would they get the surgeries they needed if the medical missions couldn't continue in Ukraine because of war? What would happen to children newly injured in the bombing and gunfire or just in ordinary accidents?

Over the years, the organization's doctors — from Massachusetts, Michigan, Texas, Washington and California — had trained physicians in Ukraine and changed the standard for pediatric burn care, reducing the number of unnecessary blood transfusions and use of ventilators, Fuzaylov said. They also launched a successful burn-prevention program, cutting the number of burns from hot water scalding accidents among children. 

Most homes in Ukraine don't have hot water heaters. So to get warm water to bathe, for laundry or to wash dishes, it must first be heated on a stove. That simple act causes hundreds of scald injuries each year in Ukraine, Fuzaylov said. 

But when the war started, the focus of the doctors' group shifted, and focused intensely on collecting donations of medical supplies to ship overseas.

"What they need is medications, antibiotics, certain types of dressings, complex dressing machines, external fixators, things that are basic, significant trauma-related surgical interventions," said Dr. Daniel Driscoll, a plastic surgeon who works with Fuzaylov both at Massachusetts General and Shriners Children's and is director of DCTHC.

"Everybody wants to help. ... We have people donating supplies in Michigan. We have people at the different hospitals I work in here in Boston. ... And Gennadiy is the wizard who can actually get it there and figure out how it's going to be delivered to the front lines or thereabouts as safely as possible."

Dr. David Brown, a plastic surgeon from the University of Michigan, led a local drive to collect eight pallets of medical supplies to ship to Ukraine. The team in Boston collected enough supplies to send over 14 more. 

DCTHC physicians also stepped up the telemedicine consultations with physicians in Ukraine, offering support.

"It's survival mode," for doctors now in Ukraine, said Dr. Branko Bojovic, chief of plastic reconstructive and laser surgery at Shiners Children's in Boston, who has been on four DCTHC medical missions there.

"They’re just doing the best that they can with the resources that they (have) and trying to decide whether they can stay in those areas safely and can continue in their function or if, for fear of their own or their family’s safety, they need to leave those situations at least temporarily.

"Unfortunately, a lot of those families that we came into contact with on some level have been affected (by the war) in ways that I probably don't even imagine. That’s something that really brought things home to me when this all started."

It was through the network Fuzaylov built in Ukraine that he learned about a 16-year-old boy from Mariupol, who was hurt in a blast from Russian forces.

"A building collapsed on his lower extremities, and they used the crane to pull him out," Fuzaylov said. 

It took 10 days for Fuzaylov to arrange for his journey to the U.S. for treatment. The boy had to be evacuated out of Mariupol in eastern Ukraine and driven by ambulance to Dnipro in the central region, then to Lviv in the west. 

From there, the boy was taken to Poland, and was flown to Washington, D.C. via air ambulance before arriving in Augusta, Georgia, where he was admitted to Doctors Hospital of Augusta, for treatment. 

Because the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine had shut down, Fuzaylov said he couldn't get a travel visa for the boy. 

"I called multiple friends," he said, "international attorneys, different organizations trying to get them to explain how to deal without a visa. I learned a completely different path, which is called humanitarian parole."

He had to raise the money, too, to pay for the boy's air ambulance, which cost more than $140,000.

It felt like a marathon, Fuzaylov said, but it wasn't his race alone. Instead, he insisted it was a collaborative effort. Donations from the Children's Burn Foundation and Sunflower of Peace, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing medical and humanitarian aid for people affected by violence in Ukraine, helped make it possible. 

"There's a lot of people involved and there is no small role," he said. "Acknowledging all players is very important to emphasize the teamwork and working together to achieve the best care for the kids."

The boy's evacuation was "a small success story amidst the craziness of what’s happening right now," Fuzaylov said.

Toddlers safely evacuated amid bombing

Within a week of the 16-year-old boy's arrival in Georgia, Fuzaylov coordinated the effort to bring two more Ukrainian children to the U.S.

Both are toddlers who were scalded by hot water — 18-month-old Dmytro Makhno of Lviv and 2½-year-old Valeria Herenok of Kyiv.

But getting them out of Ukraine was a complex ordeal that took 22 days to arrange. 

"There was an agreement between a hospital in Poland and the Lviv Burn Center," Fuzaylov said. "The Polish hospital sent their own crew to pick them up from Lviv."

Their escape was harrowing. Bombs rained down on Lviv as the ambulance drove Valeria, Dmytro and their mothers out of the city. One of the bombs exploded nearby.

"The bomb was about 100 meters away from the road. It was very close," Fuzaylov said.

Both kids arrived safely at Shriners Children's Boston on April 20, said Alison Mills, a spokesperson for the hospital. 

They underwent multiple surgeries and now are staying at Philoxenia House, just as Taras did, Fuzaylov said, while they recover and undergo rehabilitation. 

"Both are doing great," Sheridan said. "The care is the same as if they were burned next door. ... The surgeons (in Ukraine) are great and they do a lot with less and it's usually not a surgical talent problem. It's a resource problem and a money problem and we can really help with that."

U-M's Brown heard about Dmytro's and Valeria's successful evacuation from the war zone along with the 16-year-old boy's. It got him thinking: If hospitals in Massachusetts and Georgia were willing to provide medical care to seriously injured Ukrainian children, Michigan hospitals could, too.

He's been trying to find a Michigan health system willing to accept kids who've been severely burned from Ukraine — or possibly even wounded Ukrainian soldiers.

"We have direct connections with the doctors and patients there," he said of the DCTHC. "We know who to bring in and how to do that. We have donors to pay to fly the air ambulance jet here ... and we know the Minister of Health and different people that would be required ... to work through the proper channels between the two countries.

"It's all kind of on a silver platter, so to speak."

As the war stretches on, Brown said he's hopeful he can get at least one hospital in Michigan to agree to sponsor medical care for a child or a soldier from Ukraine. 

"To see loss of life and casualties, it's heartbreaking," he said. "So, if we can help some more as people of the United States, as Americans, then we should. This is what we know how to do."

Fleeing the war zone, but needing ongoing care

Dmitry Kavun was just 15 months old when he was severely burned in 2012 in an accident in their hometown of Mykolaiv, Ukraine.

"It was hot boiled water," his mother, Anna Kavun, told the Free Press. "The kettle with water fell down on him, and he got 45% of burns, almost half of his body. And we started treatment in our city. Then we had surgeries in Kyiv."

A few months after Dmitry was burned, the Kavuns made a roughly 12-hour trip to meet Fuzaylov and Driscoll, who were in Ukraine for a medical mission. 

"We met Dr. Gennadiy and his team," she said. "They had a mission in Lviv in September 2012. We came just for the visit, just to ask their opinion on what we have to do because we were lost. We were lost and we didn't know what to do." 

Three months later, the boy and his mother made the first of eight trips to the U.S., where Dmitry would get ongoing medical care. 

"He was very small and terrified after treatment in Ukrainian hospitals," she said. "It's a completely different attitude for the patient and the process. So when we came here and started treatment here at Shriners hospital, it was an absolutely different experience for me and for him."

After the war began, Kavun and Dmitry fled Mykolaiv, a southeastern Ukrainian port city where intense fighting continues.

"My husband told me to take my son and leave the house because it was dangerous," Kavun said. "My husband, my parents are still there. It's still hard in our region. ... It's still dangerous in that area. In every area, it’s dangerous."

Dmitry and his mother went to Bucharest in March, where they stayed with other Ukrainian refugees in a house provided by a local church. 

"Then, we connected with Dr. Gennadiy, and he helped us to come here," she said of Boston, where Dmitry underwent surgery this spring on his burn scars.

Plastic surgery, skin grafts and laser treatments give Dmitry, now 11, relief from the pain that comes when his bones stretch but his skin doesn't. 

This trip was nothing like the last trip Fuzaylov had arranged for them.

"In our country, now all airports are destroyed," Kavun said. "So we can't go by plane from our country now. If somebody wants to come here, for example for treatment, they have to leave Ukraine and take the plane in another country somewhere in Europe because it's unable now to get from Ukraine to here."

She and Dmitry flew out of Bucharest, changing planes in Munich before arriving in Boston in April.

A few weeks later, Dmitry sat beside Taras on a leather sofa in the living room of the Philoxenia House in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Sometimes, families from Ukraine overlap at the house, as happened when Taras and Dmitry were there.

Taras made more than 30 trips to the operating room during nearly six months in the care of Shriners Children's, Fuzaylov said. He lost the pinky finger on his left hand in the accident. 

"When I wake up, I see I don’t have got one finger and I’m not walking," Taras said. "But then I see people in sixth floor (at Shriners Children's), and they don’t have got their other arm. They don’t have got their leg, and then I know I am very lucky.

"I want to say thank you to Dr. Fuzaylov because he saved my life. Now I can walk, jump, play games."   

Taras hopes to be able to play soccer and ride his bike when he gets home. He said he'll continue to try to improve his English and study computer programming. 

"Why I want to work with the computer and English is so I have got a lot of money," Taras said. He'd use the money to "buy for me a car, a house, and after this maybe buy for other people who don’t have got a home, buy for people some food."

The sky is the limit for Taras, Kavun said, suggesting the precocious boy could one day follow in the footsteps of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

"Our president, before he was president, he was a comic. And Taras likes to talk jokes. Every day he has joke, joke, joke," she said. "In the future, you will be president of the country, just like Zelenskyy."

Taras and his mother left Boston for Warsaw, Poland, a few days after his birthday, making their way back to Ukraine and the unknown. 

She was eager to get see her husband and daughter, and to tend to the family's garden. The vegetables they plant now will ensure the family has enough food to survive the winter. 

"We are very happy to go back. We haven’t seen our family for a long time," Semenuk said. "It is quiet in our hometown now, but from time to time, there are air alarms."

Through tears, Semenuk said she has just one wish for her son: "I dream to see him a happy person."

Taras said he didn't know what it will be like to return to a country mired in conflict, but knew many of his friends wouldn't be there. 

"A lot of my friends aren’t in Ukraine," he said. "Some people go to Poland. Some people go to the other countries."

Kavun said the future is uncertain for her and Dmitry, too. 

If the battles and heavy fighting continue near Mykolaiv when Dmitry is finished with his treatments in Boston, they may go back to Romania or try to find refuge in another friendly country.

"I don't know ... if it will be OK there to come back," she said. "We're not sure, so it's hard."

It's still too soon to understand the impact the war is having on the thousands of kids with serious burn injuries who've been treated by the DCTHC team over the years in Ukraine, Bojovic said.

"To have them in this kind of holding pattern of not knowing where they're going to go or who they're going to see or how they're going to be taken care of, it’s devastating on many levels, psychologically, certainly, functionally," Bojovic said. "Some of them could be at risk for very significant problems and infections, depending if they have open wounds."

It's not safe enough now for Fuzaylov to plan another medical mission trip to Ukraine, he said, but he is considering a DCTHC medical mission trip to a bordering country, perhaps Poland, to offer some relief in the months ahead. 

And if the need arises, he and Driscoll said they are prepared to bring more children to the U.S. who need urgent burn care to hospitals willing to sponsor them.

"What's happening is not only the tragedy of the war, but you have the fact that the life still goes on and children are still going to be next to hot water and if there's any way that we can help alleviate some of the burden of general health care so that the severe trauma of war can be taken care of by these doctors, then we can see what we can do," Driscoll said. 

Follow Kristen Jordan Shamus on Twitter: @kristenshamus.