Jay Matthews, from Staines, found himself in a dangerous situation when he travelled to a frontline town in conflict-torn Ukraine to work in a hospital. A bullet pierced his front door on his first day there.
A brave British doctor working in conflict-torn Ukraine has survived after a bullet pierced his front door just a day after he arrived in the frontline town.
The sound of drones in stricken Zaporizhia is a far cry from the relative calm of Staines, Surrey, where Jay Matthews lives. The married 41-year-old faced danger while helping at a hospital just 25 miles from the south-eastern frontline between Ukraine and Russia.
Standing just steps away from where a bullet hit his temporary accommodation, Jay told the Mirror: “The fire came through the [door] window, so it makes you think about your safety and… how close you are to it all.” The practicing surgeon was on assignment with UK-Med, a British charity providing medical care in some of the world’s most dangerous places, including Gaza.
Few places are more dangerous than Ukraine, three years after Russia's massive invasion. It was only on Jay's first day in Zaporizhia in January that he escaped tragedy. Earlier that month, a Russian attack had killed 13 civilians.
When asked what it was like living in a frontline city, Jay explained: “It was unpredictable. Obviously there are drone attacks, or guided aerial munitions – GABs as they’re called – on a regular basis. It can be challenging for [your] own safety… We were obviously very close to it here in the accommodation.” Around midnight on January 22, Jay was upstairs when he heard a buzzing sound. “Then I heard gunshots,” he added. “Sometimes they sound far away, and sometimes they sound really close.
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“I thought, 'Oh, this feels real,'” he recalled. The medic then said he packed his bag of shelter items, adding: “And then I heard glass breaking in the house… At first I thought there was an explosion, and then I assumed it was maybe some debris or shards or something.”
It was later learned that the bullet had pierced two doors and a cabinet, coming from a few yards away on the other side of the hallway. While some might have interpreted it as a brush with death, Jay, who had previously worked in Gaza, seemed less alarmed than the others.
Still, he acknowledged things could have ended differently. “If I had gone down the stairs faster, I would have been literally a few meters away from him. If he had gone up higher, he would have gone through… [a colleague’s] room to mine,” he said. “The walls are thinner on the top floor, so they’re not concrete, so who knows where he would have stopped or what would have happened?”
Jay added: “The thing is, I wasn't hurt and everything was fine, so… I'm very lucky that nothing happened and I'm very grateful for that, of course. And I'm glad no one else was hurt here.” He doesn't know, but suspects the bullet may have been the result of Ukrainian return fire on the drone.
The medic also spoke about the patients coming through the door. He estimates that about a fifth of the patients his hospital sees are linked to the conflict. In an interview last month, he described one man with a gunshot wound to his leg. “He was a soldier on the front lines and he had just been shot in the shin,” he explained.
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“It did a lot of damage, took out a lot of bone and one of his arteries, so it’s going to take quite a while and be a slow recovery.” In another case, a military patient driving a vehicle apparently came under fire and crashed. “He had broken ribs, broken legs and an arm,” Jay said, explaining that he also had a fractured lower back.
The respect that Jay, who is due to be in Zaporizhia until March 11, has for his colleagues is clear. “I don’t think you come to work as a nurse, helping people you don’t know, knowing that your own people are suffering, as is your own family, without being incredibly kind, considerate, hard-working and decent,” he said.
Sourse: www.mirror.co.uk
