Name: Hordyslava Yemets
Age: 29
Education: Bogomolets National Medical University
Profession: Pediatric anesthesiologist
Did you know? She is the first doctor in her family in five generations.
Hordyslava Yemets is one of those lucky people who combines one of the things she loves with her job. As a pediatric anesthesiologist in the Medical Center for Pediatric Cardiology of the Ministry of Health in Kyiv, she specializes in taking care of children up to 1 year old and newborns.
Yemets had dreamed of being a doctor since school. When she was studying at the university, she made up her mind to be an anesthesiologist and to treat children.
“That’s probably because it’s much easier for me to find a common language with kids,” she said.
Her long shifts, and the emotional and physical stress of work are cushioned by the presence of children, she said. On a regular day, Yemets works for eight hours, or up to 24 hours if it’s a night call. But as her hours depend on the number of operations scheduled, her working time has no set limits.
Yemets says she can be called to duty anytime.
Her hospital, one of the biggest pediatric cardiology clinics in Ukraine, treats children with heart problems from newborns to 18-year-olds.
Sometimes, Yemets performs anesthesia on a one-hour-old baby who has come straight from a maternity hospital.
Yemets says it’s more pleasant to work with children than adults.
“We’ve learned how to understand them without words,” she says of her infant patients.
The center treats heart defects, which can be diagnosed during pregnancy, and concomitant diseases. During an operation babies are connected to a heart-lung bypass machine, with Yemets monitoring critical life functions and making sure the patient doesn’t afraid, or feel pain.
“An anesthesiologist’s job is to make sure a child survives surgery,” she said. Her job is over only after a child leaves hospital with their parents.
Yemets said her daily goal is the same: help all patients recover, and preferably be happy.
“Kids are more helpless, more vulnerable, but – this may sound selfish – they are easier and more pleasant to communicate with,” she said.
In her free time, Yemets works on self-development, reading foreign scientific publications and attending professional conferences in places like Milan, London and Brussels.
She also tries to follow the work of the best scholars and cardiologists, but says she has no particular favorite – she simply tries to emulate the best of them.
