Jozef Valky, head of the anesthesiology and intensive medicine clinic at the Bánská Bystrica hospital, spoke for the first time in an interview with the Slovak daily Postoj. According to him, two weeks of caring for the Prime Minister were a demanding period for him and other doctors. “Not medically, I think we did pretty well. But it was a stone of responsibility that we carried with us, but we tried to handle the whole thing as if it were our regular patient. I also told my colleagues that we should treat the prime minister the same as we are used to with other patients,” he said.
The quick recovery was said to be related to the fact that the prime minister himself wanted and fought. “If it had turned out differently than it did, I can’t even imagine what would have happened in Slovakia.” said Valky. A similar situation has never occurred in Slovakia. “If I said we weren’t under pressure, I’d be lying. My life stopped working for two weeks,” noted Valky, who has worked at the hospital for 34 years.
According to him, the hospital does not have many seriously injured patients, because they usually bleed out during transportation. Another advantage of the clinic was that it has a trauma center and a so-called transplant unit, which is intended for transplant patients and which was reserved for the prime minister and his bodyguard.
Valky recalled that when he once put President Rudolf Schuster to sleep before eye surgery, the security guard was right in the hall, “she sat next to me”, while Fico’s guards watched through the window what was going on, but did not enter the hall and tried not to interfere, so there were no problems with them.
The news of the assassination reached the head at the international congress in Žilina, but the two primary doctors were at work at the hospital, with whom he agreed what would happen. He stated that he spent years building the workplace so that he wouldn’t have to be there until death, but that it would work even better when he wasn’t there. And he is proud of his colleagues, how they managed everything.
Government politicians informed the public about the prime minister’s condition. According to the superior, the doctors only cared about the patient and deliberately cut themselves off from everything else. And the doctors who once cared for Czech President Miloš Zeman during his hospitalization, “they told me that the only thing they envy us is this communication, because it was incredibly burdensome for them at the time”.
According to Valky, the Banská Bystrica Hospital was also lucky that “people stayed here, there is not such a large outflow of people abroad as, for example, from Bratislava clinics”. He assured that “the prime minister received no special treatment” and that there are many other patients in the hospital, for example after transplants, who present more complicated cases. “The prime minister’s treatment is only an experience for us, that we treated the prime minister and luckily it was successful.”