Doctors complete open-heart surgery as hospital fire rages, pics surface online

In a heartwarming show of bravery, a group of doctors completed an open heart surgery on a patient inside a Russian hospital that caught fire on Friday (April 2) as firefighters to battled to douse the flames from outside.

The Russian doctors stayed behind in the burning, tsarist-era hospital in the country’s Far East on Friday to complete the surgery after a fire broke out on the roof while they were operating.

The surgery continued thanks to the firefighters who used fans to keep smoke out of the operating room and ran in a power cable to keep it supplied with electricity.

It took the firefighters more than two hours to put out the blaze in the city of Blagoveshchensk.

As per a ministry statement 128 people were immediately evacuated from the hospital as the fire broke out on the roof and no one was reported hurt.

A group of eight doctors and nurses completed the operation in two hours before removing the patient to another site, the emergencies ministry said.

Lead surgeon Valentin Filatov said, “There’s nothing else we could do. We had to save the person.”

“We did everything at the highest level, It was a heart by-pass operation,” the surgeon was quoted as saying by REN TV.

Antonina Smolina, a medic said that "there was no panic" among the hospital staff.

"The clinic was built more than a century ago, in 1907, and the fire spread like lightning through the wooden ceilings of the roof," the ministry said.

"A bow to the medics and firefighters," said Vasiliy Orlov, the local regional governor.

(With agency inputs)