The doctors put their own lives in danger by using some unorthodox methods in order to prevent the explosive from going off.
Recently, Ukrainian military physicians performed a rare and risky operation: they removed a live, unexploded explosive from the thorax of a patient.
“Not every wound in the heart region is lethal!” said Ukrainian deputy defense minister Hanna Maliar on Facebook. Military physicians performed a surgery to remove a VOG grenade that did not shatter from the soldier’s body.”
The surgery was a success, and the soldier is on the road to recovery.
Maliar posted an X-ray showing the grenade trapped in the soldier’s chest, as well as a picture of the operating surgeon, Andrii Verba, clutching the live grenade after the tense procedure. Verba has been hailed as “one of Ukraine’s most experienced surgeons.”
Verba did the surgery with the help of a small group of sappers, who are military engineers. He did the operation without using electrocoagulation, which is when an electric current burns the edges of blood vessels to stop bleeding during surgery. In this case, however, the ammunition could have gone off “at any time” because of electrocoagulation.
Live Science says that the ammunition, a VOG grenade, is about an inch and a half long and can be shot more than 1,200 feet away. It’s not clear, though, how it got stuck in the soldier’s chest.
“The part of the grenade that hadn’t gone off was taken from under the heart. “The grenade did not go off, but it was still dangerous,” Ukrainian adviser to the minister of internal affairs Anton Gerashchenko wrote in a Telegram update. “Our doctors have never done anything like that in their work.”
Although this operation may have been the first of its kind performed by Ukrainian physicians, there have been a few cases of comparable procedures throughout history.
similar case
Notably, a 1999 research published in the Journal of Military Medicine examined data from the US military and discovered 36 cases of unexploded munitions being taken from patients going back to World War Two. 32 of the operations were effective. Four further individuals died away from their wounds.
Later, in 2006, US military surgeons extracted a live grenade from a soldier’s belly, and in 2014, physicians extracted live, potentially explosive, ammunition from the skull of a pregnant 23-year-old lady in Afghanistan.
In the latter case, the ammo was not explosive, but the risk was high enough for physicians to avoid electrocoagulation, as the Ukrainian team did.
