Dr. Ellwanger explaining how repair could be accomplished for a patient that had been seeking treatment for three months from a bone defect resulting from war trauma. The surgery took place shortly after.
At frontline hospitals in Ukraine, soldiers arrive daily with major blast injuries to the face. Currently, traumatic injuries are treated with simple sutures to open wounds with no underlying treatment of the destroyed bone or repair of facial structures.
This patient has a ballistic injury from a bullet entering from the back of the ear and out of his nose, resulting in left maxilla fracturing into the airway. Dr. Ellwanger is training doctors in a frontline hospital on how to reposition the left maxilla to its proper location with an open reduction and surgical fixation with titanium hardware to allow for proper function again.