Baby born with half a heart saved in surgery by Irish-funded doctor

It reads like fiction — the baby born with half a heart saved by a surgical wizard paid for by Irish funds.

However the facts are indisputable: Yegour was born in Kiev, Ukraine, on November 9 with a partially formed heart and was destined to die within hours in the absence of emergency surgery.

In the most serendipitous of circumstances, it happened that one Bill Novick, a world-class American cardiac surgeon, was reasonably close at hand, having worked earlier that day with a ‘flying doctors’ mission, funded by Adi Roche’s Chernobyl Children International in the nearby Amosov Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery.