The English Surgeon – Set in Ukraine

Here’s a documentary film that touches on epilepsy, and the grim reality of medical practice contemporary Ukraine.

“The English Surgeon” is a 2007 documentary centered on its titular character Dr. Henry Marsh and his colleague Dr. Igor Petrovich as they work at a dilapidated Ukrainian hospital. The patients who come to Petrovich and Marsh are desperate, not only because of their poverty, but because of their dire shared condition: brain cancer. Many times, the already horrible disease is made inoperable by the patients’ often cost-related delay in treatment. More than once, the two doctors have to convey the truth as best they can: there is nothing they can do, and the patients will mostly likely die within a matter of years. Fortunately, this often isn’t the case, as proved by Marian, a young man whose tumor and resulting fits of epilepsy Marsh and Petrovich are able to save him from. The surgery is as much a success for the audience’s entrance into the story as it is for the cancer patient.

And more here.