A Michigan native chose to risk her life helping in “hell.”
FERNDALE, MI – When the war in Ukraine began, Laura Eisenhardt, a native of the Detroit suburbs, was living in The Netherlands, busy in her job as Chief Operating Officer of the American Institute of Minimally Invasive Heart Surgery.
Three days later, she had somehow taken a leave, filled a container with medical supplies for the international aid group Doctors Without Borders (Medecins sans Frontieres), arranged for a NATO plane to take it to Poland — and then found a way to get the supplies and herself take to a battle zone in Eastern Ukraine.
“I’m an emergency room nurse at heart. This is what I had to do,” she said. Within days, she was helping run a series of portable MASH units, many of them in tunnels. “We’d prefer hospitals, but that makes us a tempting target.” She did everything from picking shrapnel out of an old woman’s back to actual surgery. ‘There weren’t enough surgeons, so I had to resection a colon,” removing part of a wounded civilian’s large intestine and stitching it back together.
“I’ve seen it done enough, and it was either I do it or they died,” he said. “A doctor told me, there’s a lot of colon to work with. You’ll do fine, and I was,” she said.
Ten days later, she was working in a tunnel near Kyiv when she was slightly injured by an explosion, and went back to Michigan for a few days, where I caught up with her over lunch a couple days after she landed “I’ve been craving Middle Eastern food!” she told me.
Someone looking at her might have thought she had been the victim of a bad facial chemical peel, but in fact, the blast had melted part of her mask into her face. “I hadn’t slept for days — oh, you lie down, but you don’t really sleep,” she said. “I do not think my heart rate has been under 150 in weeks.”
“I don’t know what they are showing (on TV), but it’s bad,” she wrote to me while she was still in Ukraine. “I’d thought I had seen it all – trauma — but it is really bad.” Indeed, this is not her first war zone, or disaster. For nearly four years, she was a senior program director for the World Health Organization in Africa, where one of her main tasks was to prepare a plan for a possible pandemic.
Now 57, Laura Eisenhardt is perhaps uniquely suited for the roles she’s been playing. She has five college degrees, including two in nursing, an MBA, and a masters’ degree in biology. Despite living in Holland for nine years, she said her Dutch is “lousy,” but she does speak decent French, which serves her well in many countries.
Last November, she was using her medical skills in Pakistan, a land she describes as a place of poverty, “corruption, sprinkled with Taliban and with a civil war brewing,” too little medicine and skyrocketing rates of heart disease. “But the people deserve care.”
She’s also chaired an outreach program to India, and serves as a strategic advisor to the secretary general of Amnesty International.
Nobody could or would have predicted Ms. Eisenhardt’s astonishing career path when she was young. Her father was a Grosse Pointe lawyer; she married, moved to Richmond, a very conservative small town, and had three children. But the marriage didn’t last, and she realized how much there was to be done internationally.
That’s why, she told me, that after six days back in her little town that straddles Macomb and St. Clair counties, she was going back to Ukraine. She has met President Vladimir Zelenskyy and was deeply impressed. “He is accompanied by six men with machine guns wherever he goes, and looks like he has aged 10 years in the last few weeks,” she said. But since his famous statement “I need ammo, I don’t need a ride,” she said “even Ukrainians who did not vote for him think he is something like Jesus Christ.”
Ms. Eisenhardt thinks American policy since the war began has been smart, but added, “we are doing more than we are admitting,” to help Ukraine. She thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin is, frankly, evil. “He cares nothing for the lives of his soldiers; they incinerate their bodies,” so no one will ever know how many have been lost.
Her biggest fear is what may happen if Russia attacks more of Ukraine’s nuclear plants, and she fears that he might, indeed use at least a tactical nuclear weapon, especially if he is losing.“
How serious do I take that? I have a Geiger counter on my desk,” she said. Was she sure she wanted to go back, I asked?“
If I can make the difference for one person, it’s worth it. That’s our unspoken motto,” she said, looking around the restaurant at tables of happy diners. Yes, part of her wants to shake them into awareness. But instead, Laura Eisenhardt would like them to know one thing: “Yes. Whatever you think, it can happen here.”
Photo Credit: Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images
(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
