After decades in the military and more as a general surgeon in the Bay Area, Dr. Michael Baker has taken on a retirement task right up his alley: training Ukrainian medical personnel in wartime trauma medicine.
In August 2022, the Lafayette resident got himself ready for the initial mission at the invitation of International Medical Corps. He didn’t know exactly where in Ukraine he was going; for security reasons he was given the location only at the last minute.
Baker didn’t mind. He was helping in the best way he could. And he plans to continue.
“I don’t have to pick up a flak jacket and a rifle, I’m a little old for that,” he said. “I can go there and save a life.”
Baker, who chaired the John Muir Hospital surgery department in Walnut Creek and retired as a rear admiral from the Navy Reserves, has so far made two trips to Ukraine — to Kyiv and Odessa — and is gearing up for a third through the L.A.-based nongovernmental organization, which provides emergency response and health support in Ukraine as well as other countries.
“I was very honored to be able to go to Ukraine and help the Ukrainians prepare to take care of their people,” Baker said.
His role has been to train doctors and other medical staff in advanced trauma life support, a system for quick response to traumatic injuries such as those caused by a Russian missile strike on an apartment building.
While some of Baker’s students have been in the military, many are civilian doctors who never expected to treat the types of injuries that have become commonplace in wartime Ukraine.
“We had gynecologists and allergists and respiratory doctors and cardiologists,” he said. “Because they were going to be seeing casualties and they wanted to make sure that they had the skills to do what they needed to do.”
Baker also helps teach simple life-saving techniques identified by the “Stop the Bleed” program to quickly control bleeding. Developed after the mass shooting in Sandy Hook, such emergency techniques are well suited to wartime.
“We taught bus drivers and station masters and schoolteachers and librarians and medical people that weren’t in the trauma centers what to do,” he said. “And then they got a kit with pressure dressings and tourniquets that they could take with them to wherever their workplace was.”
Baker described his first trip in August to Kyiv as “very comfortable — except for the air raid sirens and the fact that there were armed guards everywhere and bomb shelters and, you know, checkpoints,” he said. “But people were out in the cafés and restaurants.”
In October, he traveled to Odessa with the same NGO.
“It’s a very pretty town, a beachfront area with a lot of stuff going on,” he said. “Obviously, now heavily fortified and defended, because they’re worried about invasion, by land and by sea.”
The Lafayette resident, 72, wanted to be a surgeon since he was a child in Pasadena.
“I read a book when I was about 7 years old called ‘The Century of the Surgeon.’ I still remember it,” he said.
Baker turned his childhood plan into decades working in medicine. After finishing his residency, he signed up for what he thought was going to be a two-year term in the Navy Reserves but ended up as a second career, including a stint in the Gulf War. He said his Jewishness, relatively uncommon in the field, was “never an issue in the military.”
In retirement, Baker has also been lecturing, mostly on military history, through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes.
In a few weeks he’ll be back in Ukraine, though again he doesn’t know exactly where. But when he gets there, he knows he’ll be meeting more Ukrainians trying to do the best they can to defend their country.
“They will never give up,” he said. “No matter how bad it is, they’re not going to be bulldozed by the Russians.”