Winter 2025 53 P R O F I L E SEAN FLEMING bedridden patients, for getting him accepted into medical school at Oregon Health & Science University. Around that time, he married Alice Henderson (who also grew up in Corvallis) and was accepted into the U.S.Army’s Health Professions Scholarship Program.After he graduated from OHSU and completed his military service, the couple returned to Corvallis and co-founded Corvallis Family Medicine in 1988. His interest in supporting doctors in Uzhhorod, a small regional capital in the farwest of then-newlyindependent Ukraine, started with a Corva- llis Sister Cities Association (sister cities.corvallis.or.us) visit he made in 1993. Ukraine had just emerged from the Soviet Union’s collapse and its infrastructure was broken. “I saw gauze being washed and reused in the hospital,” he recalls. “Surgical tables were moved next to a window for operations in case the electricitywas turned off.The hospital kept a bathtub filled with water in case the water was shut off.” Since then, his advocacy for Uzhhorod has been unrelenting. In just the first eight years, he and Alice organized six shipments, each consisting of two to four 40-foot containers filled with educational, medical and other supplies, including hospital beds,X-rayand ultrasound machines, medical lab equipment and surgical tools. “We also obtained a $1.5 million grant from USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development] to help develop a rural primary care clinic, a women’s healthcare clinic and a program for preventative health education,” Rampton says. With Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, the couple doubled down on their three decades of support for Ukraine, forming a working partnership with Dr. Andrii Buchok, an orthopedic surgeon at the Uzhhorod City Multidisciplinary Clinical Hospital’s Traumatology Department. Uzhhorod is separated from the rest of Ukraine by the Carpathian Mountains, with a unique blend of Ukrainian, Hungarian, Roma and Slovakian cultures. Though one of the country’s poorest regions, its isolation also means it’s been spared the worst of the war. That relative security makes Uzhhorod a somewhat safer haven for tens of thousands of refugees. Buchok treats “dirty wounds” that combine trauma and infection. Patients often arrive in Uzhhorod following surgeries at hospitals nearer the front lines. Ukrainian experts like Buchok have become among the world’s best at healing such patients, saving limbs that Rampton says many American doctors would have amputated. “They’ve earned my highest level of respect,” Rampton told me during our visit to the hospital last year. I’d joined a sister city delegation that traveled at our own expense to ferry cases of medical equipment, like surgical nails used to hold shattered bones together. Rampton explored transferring patients to U.S. military hospitals in Germany, but NATO regulations prevented that. Plus, Ukrainian surgeons treating blast injuries in a real war setting turned out to have the best skills. “That was when we decided to find the needed fracture pins and plates,” he says. Some of the wounded have nowhere to go after release, so the hospital tries to give them a place to stay while they recover. How long that can continue is unclear. “The war comes closer every day,” said Arpad Kron, an Uzhhorod National University scientist and volunteer who teamed up with the sister cities group to support orphanages, nursing homes and other facilities as refugees arrived. Though Uzhhorod is far from the current front lines, bombing of Ukraine-wide civilian infrastructure means nowhere is truly safe.Air raid sirens sounded frequently during our visit, with missiles hitting Lviv, not far from where we were. The middle-of-the-night wail of the sirens was haunting, like a church bell tolling, in real-time, the deaths of nearby civilians. But resilience is part of life in Ukraine, where doctors like Buchok are resolved to keep matching calamity with better medical skills. Meanwhile, in America, Dr. Mark Rampton is resolved to help. “DOCTORS … ARE RESOLVED TO KEEP MATCHING CALAMITY WITH BETTER MEDICAL SKILLS.” ↓ Ukrainian surgeon Dr. Andrii Buchok talks with a patient recovering from a Russian drone attack. The author, a courtesy professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, took this photo during a 2023 trip with the Corvallis Sister Cities Association.
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