STRONGSVILLE, Ohio — Dianka Tsyukh was ready to have spinal surgery last year on Feb. 28, that is until the Russian invasion of her home country of Ukraine canceled the life-saving procedure.
Her family lives outside of Lviv and watched the war unfold, fearful of if or when it would reach them.
Dianka has cerebral palsy, and experts say 90% of children with the condition who require a wheelchair have severe scoliosis. Her curvature was at 135 degrees.
"The biggest issue is the pelvis really collapses inside of the thorax and compresses the abdominal content," Dr. Todd Ritzman, chair of orthopedics at Akron Children's Hospital, says, "so the stomach and gastric contents are up into the torso, and that can really affect digestion and breathing.
"This is a big deformity, traditionally, here in the States. We would've operated on this a few years ago, when the deformity was 50 or 60 degrees in size."
Dianka's mother, Nadia, was determined to help her daughter and was fortunate to have family living in Strongsville. They reached out to Uniting for Ukraine, a program that allows family to sponsor relatives fleeing Ukraine for up to two years. They arrived last summer, and Nadia got to work finding a hospital that could care for Dianka.
"I saw many hospitals on the internet," Nadia told us. "I asked many people about hospitals in the U.S.A., not only Akron or Cleveland.
But she didn't have to look far: Ritzman does mission work with Spine Hope, a charitable organization that travels the world correcting spinal scoliosis in children. They were supposed to go to Ukraine, but then the war broke out.
Ritzman later heard about Dianka's case. Akron Children's helped the family get Medicaid, and Dianka's surgery took place this past January. Ritzman knew the procedure was critical and her spine would only get worse.
"Ultimately, it can shorten lifespan because of lung problems," Ritzman said.
The surgery took nine hours as Ritzman and his team painstakingly straightened Dianka's spine from 135 degrees to about 40 with a variety of implants.
"It was a very rigid curve," he admitted. "So, some curves are flexible, some are not, and this was a very rigid curve, so we had to use some extra techniques to help make the spine more flexible and enable us to get the correction. And then the fact that she'd had a neurosurgical procedure done a short time ago, there was a fair amount of scarring exposed spinal cord, which added more risk.
"We did a fusion from the top of the spine all the way down into the pelvis through an incision right in the middle of the back. Once we expose the spine, we then instrument the spine by putting implants into each of the vertebrae, two of them in each vertebrae. Then we do procedures called osteotomies to make the spine more flexible.
"Then we did a procedure that's called temporary internal distraction. So, we actually put temporary implants on ribs and temporary implants on one side of the pelvis and incrementally lengthen those through the procedure so we can gradually gain correction, and then finish that all with the rods that you see now that fuse the spine."
Ritzman believes Dianka is now out of the woods, and hopefully will not need any further procedures.
Dianka got out of the hospital on her 13th birthday. She's also a singer, and Ritzman says the procedure, which now allows her to sit upright, will help improve her lung function.
Nadia says her daughter could not sit for long periods of time in her wheelchair because of the pain and discomfort she was in. Now, that has changed.
"She said she is very happy that she can sit for [a] longer time than before surgery," Nadia beamed, "and it's very important to have a straight back when singing."
Dianka is back in school, learning English, but she misses her Ukrainian classes. The war knocked out the internet, so online classes are no longer available.
The family yearns to go home, but they're grateful that Dianka was able to receive exceptional care while she's here.
"I want this war to end right now, because so many people died," Nadia said, sadly. "Many children."
Ritzman is grateful he had the chance to help.
"[It's] pretty remarkable just to think of the life they've lived and experienced in comparison to the ones we do or my children and I do," he stated, "so it's a pretty special thing to be able to interact with them, to see their resilience, and you know, to see that they're no different than we are."