Djindjic's heart was in my hands, there was blood everywhere: Dr. Ristic about his toughest surgery

Photo: Marko Todorovic. Printscreen: RTS

"I will remember that surgery on March 12, 2003, after the assassination, for as long as I live. I still feel like all of that happened yesterday, as if I took the scalpel yesterday and started making an incision on the chest of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. Everything was like in a movie," Dr. Miljko Ristic tells the daily Kurir.

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Ristic says he still feels like it all happened yesterday, rather than 17 years ago.

"Crystal clear are even the moments before I entered the Emergency Center, after the secretary of then director of the Clinical Center of Serbia Vojko Djukic called me to say to urgently come from cardiac surgery ward, a building located across the street, where I had completed surgery on one patient half an hour before."

With these words, Miljko Ristic, one of Serbia's best cardiac surgeons, begins the story of the difficult struggle to save Djindjic's life, which, unfortunately, ended tragically. Ristic is also the man who held the heavily wounded heart of Prime Minister Djindjic in his hands that day.

"It was like in a movie. I had left the operating room at my clinic. It wasn't even half an hour before my phone rang. I was told to come to the Emergency Center immediately. Not to ask anything, just to show up. It happened around 12:30 pm. I asked which department to go to, because there are so many of them, and got the answer, "Doctor, everything will be clear to you when you come!," Ristic tells Kurir, adding that when he got there, it became clear to him that this was about some public figure.

According to Ristic, when he entered the building, he was told that he was going to the resuscitation department, where he saw from the door that it was Djindjic on the table.

Zoran Djindjic/Printscreen: RTS

"He was very pale. His vital signs were bad. Blood pressure, pulse and respiration were below all physiological limits. There was no dilemma that he had to go to the operating room at once, to try to bring him back to life by opening his chest, massaging his heart, which is done in such situations... We rushed Djindjic to the OR running. Within minutes he was already on the table. Al of us from the surgical team were there. The scalpel was in my hand. I started to make an incision on his chest. While opening the chest, we found an enormous amount of blood that had collected there. We noticed a large wound on the right side of the heart, six by two centimeters, and one smaller on the opposite side. We quickly patched them up. We tried the massage, resuscitation, but it did not have any effect. The same thing happened with blood transfusion and other fluid replacements," says Ristic.

He adds that Djindjic was bleeding a lot at that time.

Miljko Ristic/ Foto: Marko Todorovic

"We couldn't see what was going on because there were no visible injuries on the body other than the entry and exit wounds from the bullet. We decided to open the abdomen. Instantly, a huge amount of blood came out of him. The source of so much bleeding was the liver. It has shattered into a thousands of pieces! Therefore, it had been a very destructive bullet that, in addition to directly injuring the heart, had very high lateral pressure on the surrounding organs, in this case the liver. It was impossible to sew it up. We understood why the resuscitation did not produce results," Ristic reveals, and says:

"The replacement of blood and other fluids still did not produce results because the injuries to the liver were such that whatever entered the body drained out immediately through that destroyed organ. An impossible situation. The whole operation did not take more than an hour. At that moment, the patient could have been saved by an instant organ transplant, which we didn't have at the time. We had to pronounce him dead."

Ristic was the last person to hold Djindjic's heart in his hands that day.

"I held the prime minister's heart in my hands. It's not the first time. I held thousands of other people's hearts in my hands. But the burden at that moment of consideration for me was what method to apply, what surgical approach to have, what instrument to use, what thread... and how the surgery on Djindjic's heart would end."

(Telegraf.rs)