Sofiia Baturina and her doctor, Barry Love, MD
When Russian forces invaded her hometown in Ukraine, 16-year-old Sofiia Baturina had never heard of Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital thousands of miles away.
The young girl, born with a rare heart condition that required life-long care, knew that she had a long, perilous journey ahead. She was often frightened, and winded because of her heart condition. But further care would have to wait until she reached safety with her mom and dad.
After a harrowing journey out of Ukraine, they arrived in Germany. At this point, Sofiia’s older sister, Anna, who lived in New York, made contact with the Staten Island-based Global Medical Relief Fund seeking help. The nonprofit foundation arranged for flights out of Germany, and with one email quickly connected the family to doctors at Mount Sinai, who immediately offered to help.
When Sofiia arrived in New York City with her parents on June 27, she was exhausted. Her hometown of Severodonetsk, a city of about 100,000 residents in northeast Ukraine, was still on her mind. Located about 90 miles from the Russian border, it had been a focal point of the war and the scene of fierce fighting. The city was now in ruins, and she could only guess whether she would ever return.
“My city remains intact only in my memory’s most distant, secluded corners, where it is still young, beautiful, clean, and tidy,” she says. The loss of her home, her hometown, and her homeland, she says, represents “the greatest loss of my life.”
But it was not her first test.
Sofiia Baturina wearing a traditional Ukrainian wreath.
When the war with Russia broke out, she had already endured a lifetime of surgeries to fix her heart. Born with the heart condition tetralogy of Fallot, she had three prior heart operations performed in Kyiv—the first when she was 10 months old. While in the hospital preparing for a fourth surgery, she was informed that the operation would be postponed because she had COVID-19. After she recovered, with the war underway, there was no chance of finding a surgeon in Ukraine.
Once at Mount Sinai, Sofiia and her family finally received some good news: After reviewing the records the family brought and performing additional testing, the team at Mount Sinai felt that Sofiia could be treated with a minimally invasive catheterization procedure rather than surgery. Her doctors in Ukraine had recommended open-heart surgery, which comes with a much longer and harder recovery.
On August 2, Barry Love, MD, Director of the Congenital Cardiac Catheterization Program at the performed a two-hour procedure from a small incision in the groin.
Instead of replacing an old conduit, the narrowed tube between the right heart and the lungs, which had been implanted during a previous surgery, Dr. Love enlarged this critical tube with a series of balloons, and then he placed a metal cage, called a stent, to hold it open. Finally, he telescoped a new valve within the stent and expanded in-place to complete the procedure and allow the blood to again flow freely to the lungs and not leak back to the heart.
“Before we intervened, Sofiia’s right heart pressure was dangerously high,” Dr. Love says. “After the stent and valve, her right heart pressure is nearly normal. This is an incredibly satisfying result.”
Sofiia was discharged from the hospital the next day. A week later, she was walking without symptoms. She was excited to tell Dr. Love, “I walked 19,000 steps yesterday and didn’t get tired or have to stop.”
Sofiia and her family are grateful for the warm welcome and expert care they received at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital.
“I’m feeling great!” she says. “My life became more accessible and comfortable after the surgery. I do my best to walk more when I have free time from school. I especially enjoy walking in Central Park.”
Looking back on the toll of the war and the pandemic, she says, “I don’t know how I managed to stay strong. That was my only choice. Letting the fear swallow and paralyze you is the worst thing you can do.”
Sofiia and her father, Andril, hiding out in a basement during their long and arduous escape from Ukraine.