A five-year-old Ukrainian girl who fled her war-torn country with her mother has received lifesaving heart treatment in Israel.
Karina Andreiko’s mother Iryna last month sought help from an Israeli field hospital about five kilometers (three miles) from the family’s home near the Polish border.
A doctor there listened to Karina’s heart, heard a murmur and conducted an ultrasound.
The diagnosis was a congenital defect, treatable with a simple procedure available in Israel, but not in Ukraine, doctors said.
An Israeli nonprofit organization called Save a Child’s Heart agreed to transport Karina to Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, near Tel Aviv, for treatment.
Passports were secured, a plan was made, and on Monday, two weeks after Karina’s mother approached the field hospital, doctors in Israel treated Karina with the catheterization expected to allow her to live a normal life.
During the procedure, her doctors inserted a catheter into Karina’s leg, threaded it to her heart and inserted a device there.
In time, the heart tissue would grow around the device, Karina’s doctors said.
The medical center performs more than 250 such procedures on children a year.
“On the one hand, I am very worried about her (Karina), but I think everything will be fine”, Iryna said.
Israel is one of the few countries that has good working relations with both Russia and Ukraine.
While Israel has not imposed sanctions against Russia or provided arms to Ukraine, it has criticized the invasion and provided humanitarian assistance to Ukraine.
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at CBN