Moscow: Going above and beyond their call of duty, a team of doctors continued to operate and successfully completed an open heart surgery on a patient even as the hospital was on fire! The incident happened on Friday as a hospital in Blagoveshchensk caught fire while firefighters battled the flames from the outside and evacuated more than 120 people, AFP reported. However, instead of evacuating, a team of 8 doctors and other employees continued to operate on the patient on the ground floor, while risking their own lives.
The surgery continued as the primary responders laid an electrical cable to provide energy to the working room. As smoke started to enter the working room, “compressed air gadgets had been introduced to readiness to present doctors with a fancy operation,” stated Konstantin Rybalko, Deputy Head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Russian Federation.
A video of the incident has gone viral on social media and people have lauded doctors for fulfilling their duty in times of such crisis.
Watch the video here:
“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.
After the operation was conducted, the patient was evacuated from the burning building to another hospital
“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 emergencies ministry said, adding that no one was reported hurt. “A bow to the medics and firefighters,” said Vasiliy Orlov, the local regional governor.
Local authorities have also promised to award the doctors who continued with the operation and the firefighters who extinguished the blaze.