GERMANTOWN, Wis. — A Madison-area doctor travelled more than 4,000 thousand miles into Ukraine, all so he could bring some much needed medical hope and supplies to hospitals most in need.
“It’s a full-time job,” Dr. Doug Davis said a few days ahead of the trip while inside the Milwaukee-area Patriot Transports warehouse.
Through his medical connections, Davis has brought somewhere between 100 to 200 volunteers together to pack supplies at Patriot Transports.
He said the goal was to simply make a difference for the depleted hospitals inside the war-torn country.
“You kind of realize you just keep plugging along at it, and most of what we set out to do we get accomplished here,” Davis said about his labor of love effort.
“This is great, this is a surgical suture,” he said while he pulled out one many critical items he was preparing for the aid mission.
For two weeks in February, Davis personally escorted and donated medical supplies into several Ukraine hospitals.
“For ICU, for surgery, for the frontline,” Davis’ brother-in-law, Dr. Teras Khaba, said about where the items go.
His own family escaped Ukraine at the start of the war — and he said he was grateful Davis was volunteering his time and talent.
“You know, he’s (Davis) the brain of our volunteer work, of our projects,” Dr. Khaba said.
And that brain headed into the heart of Ukraine’s hardest hit areas.
Davis sent Spectrum News jarring video of the air sirens going off overhead, while he saw firsthand the makeshift ways doctors must practice medicine inside hospital basements. In one instance, a pediatric oncology site was opened in an old underground pool.
“The difficult part for me personally, I think for many of us, is making decisions how to distribute the aid,” Friends of Be An Angel’s Anya Verkhovskaya said about how Davis was also helping her team distribute generators.
She said his network of physician support through the Ukraine Medical Association of North America and the Wisconsin Rotary helped to make her efforts possible.
“It means the world when you working around the clock under extremely difficult and stressful circumstances to have the support system and the help that we provide to each other,” Verkhoskaya said.
Davis said since the war began, the warehouse has sent around 50 tons of medical relief supplies.
You can learn more about the effort and the critical medical items Davis is working to provide here.