“They pulled a shrapnel out of my heart”

From his pocket, Sergius Melnik removes a small rusty, wrapped in paper.

He holds it. “It grazed my kidney, my lungs and my heart,” says the Ukrainian serviceman quietly.

Traces of dried blood are still visible on a Russian drone shrapnel that settles in his heart as he fights in eastern Ukraine.

“I didn’t even realize what it was in the beginning – I thought it was just not my breath under the armor of my body,” he says. “They had to extract shrapnel out of my heart.”

With the rise of the war with drones in Ukraine, these injuries are becoming more and more frequent. Drones often carry weapons and materials that fragmented and cause more complex wounds to shrapnel.

According to Ukrainian military medics, the wounds of shrapneli now make up up to 80% of the trauma of the battlefield.

Unlearned, Sergius’ injury would be fatal.

“The fragment was as sharp as the blade. The doctors said it was a big piece and that I was lucky to survive,” he says.

But not only luck saved him, but a new piece of medical technology. Magnetic extractor.

The cardiovascular surgeon Serhiy maksymenko shows footage of the metal fragment caught in the beating heart of Serhiy before being delicately removed by a thin magnet device.

“You don’t have to make large cuts in the heart,” explains Dr. Maximenko. “I just make a small cut, I put the magnet and it removes the shrapnel out.”

In just one year, the Doctor Maksymenko team performed over 70 successful cardiac surgery with the device that changed the face of front medicine in Ukraine.

The development of these extractors came after first -line medics emphasized the urgent need for a safe, fast, minimally invasive way to remove shrapnel.

Oleh Bykov – who worked as a lawyer – caused this development. Since 2014, he has supported the army as a volunteer. He met with medics on the front line and magnetic extractors were created from his conversations.

The concept is not new. Magnets have been used to remove metal from wounds since the Crimean War in the 1850s. But Oleh’s team upgrade the approach, creating flexible abdominal surgery models, delicate workpieces and high bone strength tools.

The operations became more precise and less invasive. The magnet can move on the surface of the wound to remove fragments out. The surgeons then make a small incision and the piece is removed.

Holding a thin pen -shaped tool, Oleh demonstrates its power by lifting Sledgehammer with the magnetic tip.

His work has been praised by other military medics, including David Not, a veteran of military zones around the world.

“The war is developing things that they would never have thought about in civil life,” he says.

The wounds of fragmentation have increased due to the changing face of the war and as it takes a long time to find that he believes that this device can be a change of game.

He says the search for shrapnel in patients is like a “search for a needle in hay”- this is not always successful and delayed the treatment of other victims.

Searching for fragments can be manually dangerous and requires larger cuts that can cause more bleeding – “so you can just find them using a magnet is a brilliant.”

What started as a field tool has already been deployed in Ukraine, with 3,000 units being distributed in hospitals and front medics, such as Andri Alban, who says he has come to rely on the device.

It often works while under fire, in trenches or improvised outdoor clinics and sometimes without local anesthesia.

“My job is to save lives – wounds for bandaging and to receive soldiers evacuated,” he says.

There was no formal certification of the magnetic extractor.

The Ukrainian Health Ministry says that medical devices should be fully complied with to the technical provisions. However, in exceptional cases, such as martial law or state of state, the use of non -certified devices is allowed to meet the needs of military and security forces.

There is no time for bureaucracy in the height of the war, explains Mastermind Oleh. “These devices save lives. If someone thinks my actions are a crime, I will take responsibility. I am even ready to go to prison, if it is. But then all the doctors who use these devices should also be deprived of liberty,” he adds half joke.

David Not agrees that certification is not a major priority so far and believes that the device may be useful in other military areas such as gas.

“At war, this is not really necessary. You do only things that are important for saving life.”

In Lviv’s wife, Sergius Julia is just grateful that her husband survived her injury.

“I just want to praise those people who invented this extractor,” she says tears. “Thanks to them, my husband is alive.”

Additional reporting by Jasmine Dyer and Kevin McGregor.