3 Months After Being Flown From Ukraine To Israel With 2% Survival Chance, Teen Leaves ICU

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — Three months after being airlifted from Ukraine to Israel deep in a coma, Anna Kosma, a Ukrainian-Israeli teenager who had suffered a rare infection which caused her condition to deteriorate significantly, has now made a miraculous recovery.

As the health system in Ukraine fell apart in the wake of the ongoing war with Russia, Kosma was suffering from tens of seizures a day after an infection caused her to suffer from epilepsy and other serious reactions. Local doctors had given the 18-year-old medicine that temporarily paralyzed her, and her family didn’t know where to turn.

United Hatzalah stepped in and volunteered to fly the stricken teenager to Israel for treatment. An ambulance was waiting at the airport to whisk her to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, where she was, until now, in the ICU.

“I met the ambulance, and took her straight to intensive care, without even stopping at the ER as there was no point given the seriousness of her condition,” Dr. Stefan Mausbach, director of neuro-intensive care, told The Times of Israel site. “She had been having seizures for weeks.”

Mausbach said that when she arrived, Anna “was totally non-reactive and in a coma.”  He added that the chance of serous brain damage in such scenarios is very high. “I estimated her chances of survival at 1% to 2%.”

Mausbach’s colleague Dr. Roni Eichel, director of neurology at Shaare Zedek, explained that she faced a rare case of fever turned epilepsy that is “very difficult to treat with drugs, so that the patient in most cases suffers from severe brain damage, and in many cases there is a risk of death.”

The doctors initially deepened her coma to a state called cerebral anesthesia, as this allowed her to be treated with a reduced chance of brain damage. They maintained this state for four days. After this, they changed all her medications and saw some improvement. Mausbach said: “She started to react more, but even then, she had around 20 seizures a day for another week.”

After a long process including different approaches and different drugs, Anna has now left intensive care and is in rehabilitation.

“I was very excited and very glad she was discharged,” Mausbach said. “We put in lots of effort into helping her — working with her all day and night. What we just witnessed is something that doctors see once in a lifetime. We have a lot of miseries in intensive care, so to see something like this is so great.”