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Jay Matthews, from Staines, has been facing danger by going to a frontline city in stricken Ukraine and working in a hospital – a bullet was fired through his front door and the first day he arrived
A brave British medic working in war-torn Ukraine survived a bullet being fired through his front door – on only the day he arrived in a frontline city.
The buzz of drones in stricken Zaporizhzhia is a far cry from the relative quiet of Staines, in Surrey, where Jay Matthews lives. But the married 41-year-old has been facing danger by helping at a hospital in the city — only about 25 miles from Ukraine’s south-eastern frontline with Russia.
Speaking just yards from where the bullet struck at his guesthouse, Jay told the Mirror: “We’ve had fire come through the [door] window, so that makes you sort of think about your own safety and… really brings home how close you really are to it all.” The operating department practitioner has been on a deployment with UK-Med, a British charity which provides healthcare in some of the world’s most perilous spots including Gaza.
Few places are more dangerous than Ukraine, some three years on from Russia’s full-scale invasion. And on only Jay’s first day in Zaporizhzhia in January he had a lucky escape. Earlier that month, 13 civilians were killed there in a Russian attack.
Asked how it had been living in a frontline city, Jay explained: “It’s been up and down. Obviously there are regular drone attacks or guided aerial ballistics come over – GABs, they call them. That can be difficult just because [of] your own safety… We’ve obviously been very close to it here in the guesthouse.” Around midnight on January 22 , Jay was upstairs and heard drones. “Then I heard the gunfire,” he said. “Sometimes… it sounds far away, and sometimes it sounds quite close.
“I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds close,’” he recalled. The medic then explained he was picking up his grab bag for the shelter, adding: “And then I heard glass shattering in the house… at first I thought there’d been an explosion so I thought maybe it was like some debris or shrapnel or something.”
It later emerged a bullet had gone through two doors, and a cupboard yards away on the other side of the hallway. For what some would consider a brush with death, Jay – who has previously been deployed to Gaza – appeared less fazed than others might.
Yet he recognised things could easily have gone differently. “Had I been quicker down to the stairs, I’d have been literally metres from it. Had it come in higher it would have gone through… [a colleague’s] room before mine,” he said. “They’re thinner walls upstairs, so they’re not concrete, so who knows where it would have stopped or what would have happened?”
Jay added: “The fact is that I wasn’t hurt and everything was fine, so… very lucky that nothing happened and really grateful for that, of course. And glad nobody else was hurt in here as well.” He does not know but suspects the bullet was Ukrainian defensive fire against a drone.
The medic also shed light on the patients coming through the door. About a fifth of the patients his hospital sees are conflict-related, he estimated. Speaking in an interview last month, he described one man who had a leg gun-shot wound. “He was an infantry soldier on the frontlines and just got shot through the lower leg,” he explained.
“It’s done a lot of damage, taking out a lot of bone and one of his arteries so it’s going to be quite a long and slow recovery.” In another case, a patient in the military driving a vehicle apparently came under fire and crashed. “He had broken ribs, broken legs and a broken arm,” Jay said, explaining that he also had a lower back fracture too.
The esteem that Jay, due to be in Zaporizhzhia until March 11, holds colleagues in is clear. “I don’t think you turn up to work as a nurse, deliver care to people that you don’t know, knowing your own people are suffering, like your own family are struggling, without being unbelievably kind and thoughtful and hard-working and decent,” he said.
“It’s a real pleasure and an honour to be around those sort of people. Because I’d like to think that if it was at my home in England, I’d like to think that I’d still get up and go but you never know, you never know what you’d be like, do you? So, I think, real admiration to them in really difficult times for sticking to it all and delivering… care for their country and the people in their country that need it.”