"The hardest part is triaging the wounded": combat medic Morfin's story
Stepan, who goes by the alias Morfin (Morphine), is a combat medic from Halychyna, a region in the west of Ukraine. In 2020, he signed a contract with the National Guard to prepare to defend the country against Russia.
Source: National Guard
Details: Stepan is originally from Ivano-Frankivsk but has lived in Kharkiv since 2006. He worked as an emergency traumatologist in hospitals in the city and oblast.
He said that when he was living in Kharkiv, he began to speak Russian because "that's what the people around me were speaking". He admitted that he is ashamed of that now.
"I’m really ashamed of that now. For some time I felt like a traitor to my parents and the land. Since 24 February 2022, I’ve only spoken Ukrainian. It’s a matter of principle," he emphasised.
When he signed his contract in 2020, he chose the alias Morfin because it is the main component of strong painkillers.
Stepan said he realised that the full-scale invasion was inevitable a few months before it started, as the Russians were deploying field hospitals on the border with Ukraine.
While he was at university, Stepan had heard a story from a professor at the military department about how the Russians set up field hospitals on the border of Tajikistan two months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
"Our colonel used to say: ‘Remember: every war begins with this.’ So when I saw news reports about Russian field hospitals being built in Belarus and Russia, I realised that the invasion was inevitable and would happen soon. I got my family ready and acted accordingly. I got the family out on time, and I packed a set of essentials that I never took out of my car," Morfin recollects.
He said that in the first few months, he defended Kharkiv airport with his units. The timely blowing up of a runway prevented the Russians from landing airborne troops, so Stepan saw active combat in the defence of Izium, Pryshyb and Balakliia.
Morfin has always provided medical assistance at frontline positions. He said that foreign instructors were surprised at how the Ukrainians managed to stabilise injured soldiers only a kilometre away from Russian positions.
"They work strictly according to protocols. They didn’t understand that we weren’t able to take the wounded out for a day because the road was being attacked by tanks and artillery," Morfin recounts sadly.
He added that near the front, they were forced to provide aid in dugouts because the stabilisation point was 15 kilometres away. The journey took 2-3 hours in normal weather and the road was impassable in rain.
"The hardest part of a combat medic's job is triaging the wounded, because you determine who’s going to live. If you were working normally, under protocols, you could probably save everyone.
But there’s no time and no resources, and you understand that in the few hours that separate the injured from the hospital, the seriously wounded will die. So you have to choose between those who can keep fighting now and those who have a chance of surviving in the time that you have, which you really don’t. Helicopters only come for evacuation in Hollywood films. We drag them in our arms and in cars along destroyed roads," Stepan concludes.
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