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    How Dr. Alex Arroyo Spends His Sundays (in Costume)

    Dr. Alex Arroyo, a director of pediatric medicine in Brooklyn, gets to live out his “Star Wars” dreams, practice jujitsu and make a big mess while cooking for his family.“Hey, buddy, how are you doing?” a man wearing a Boba Fett costume said as he leaned over the bed of a young boy in a hospital gown.It was a Sunday afternoon in the emergency room at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where Dr. Alex Arroyo, the hospital’s director of pediatric emergency medicine, often dons one of more than 20 costumes when he visits patients. His favorite is Boba Fett, the famed bounty hunter from the “Star Wars” films.“I love what I do, but it’s sure hot in there!” said Dr. Arroyo, 48, who has worked at the hospital since 2006. He started wearing costumes in 2021.A die-hard “Star Wars” fan who grew up watching the original trilogy with his parents, Dr. Arroyo has passed that love on to his two youngest children, Grayson, 8, and Karra, 6. For New York Comic Con each year, the whole family dresses up, including his wife, Dr. Sharon Yellin, 44, a fellow pediatric emergency medicine physician who works at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. One year they went as the family from “Encanto.”“I was the big, strong sister with the donkey,” Dr. Arroyo said, referring to the character Luisa.Dr. Arroyo, who also has a 21-year-old son, Colin, from a previous marriage, was born in the Borough Park neighborhood of South Brooklyn — at Maimonides, in fact. Now he lives less than a mile from the house where he grew up, in a four-bedroom, three-story 1920s brownstone. He uses one of the spare bedrooms as his office and rents out the third floor.“It’s a frightening place to be inside of because I’m also an active-duty comic collector,” he said of his office. “It’s filled wall to wall with toys. It’s my sanctuary away from the world.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    5 Russian Bullets Dashed an Opera Singer’s Dreams. Then He Reclaimed His Voice.

    While on a rescue mission in Ukraine, Sergiy Ivanchuk was shot in the lungs, apparently ending his chance at opera stardom. His recovery is a marvel of medicine, chance and his own spirit.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.ULM, Germany — It was the most pivotal performance of his 29 years. There were no costumes, no stage, no orchestra pit. Instead, a lone pianist hunched expectantly over her instrument. For an audience, a handful of doctors and nurses watched from a cool white hospital lobby.Sergiy Ivanchuk — his face patched with bandages, legs trembling beneath his trousers — began hesitantly. But as his deep baritone held, confidence grew. By the time he finished with a Ukrainian folk tune, his song soared with the passion of a man brought back from the dead, a man reveling in a voice reclaimed.

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    “For three months, I thought I would die,” he told those assembled. “And now, I can sing again.”Not long before, Mr. Ivanchuk had believed he was on his deathbed, his lungs punctured by bullets, his body attached to a tangle of tubes.On March 10, Mr. Ivanchuk, an aspiring opera singer, had been working with humanitarian volunteers helping civilians flee the besieged Ukrainian city of Kharkiv when Russian forces attacked, and he was shot.Even if he managed to survive, he remembered thinking, surely his singing days were over.But a string of chance encounters, committed doctors and the love of a mother all led to that unexpected performance in a German military hospital this summer, giving Mr. Ivanchuk a chance to transform a tragedy into an opportunity to salvage his longtime dream of opera stardom.“So many different circumstances had to happen,” said Mr. Ivanchuk, wondering if science and his own spirit were the only factors in his recovery. “There is something. God or an angel saved me. There is something there.”“For three months, I thought I would die,” said Mr. Ivanchuk, shown in his room at a military hospital in Ulm, Germany.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesIn 2020, Mr. Ivanchuk was studying opera in Italy, and he had big ambitions: to perform on the stages of the Metropolitan in New York and La Scala in Milan.Then the pandemic closed borders around the globe. His music school was closed, and Mr. Ivanchuk was stuck in Ukraine, struggling with severe depression.Two years later, as the world began reopening, Russia invaded, and Mr. Ivanchuk found himself trapped in Ukraine once more: Men of fighting age were banned from leaving the country.His dream was rapidly fading — opera singers should complete their training by their early 30s. No one could guess when the war would end.The State of the WarDramatic Gains for Ukraine: After Ukraine’s offensive in its northeast drove Russian forces into a chaotic retreat, Ukrainian leaders face critical choices on how far to press the attack.How the Strategy Formed: The plan that allowed Ukraine’s recent gains began to take shape months ago during a series of intense conversations between Ukrainian and U.S. officials.Putin’s Struggles at Home: Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine have left President Vladimir V. Putin’s image weakened, his critics emboldened and his supporters looking for someone else to blame.Southern Counteroffensive: Military operations in the south have been a painstaking battle of river crossings, with pontoon bridges as prime targets for both sides. So far, it is Ukraine that has advanced.Yet like so many of his compatriots, Mr. Ivanchuk wanted to join the fight. Not on the front lines — “I’d be useless for that,” he joked — but by using his 30-year-old blue Lada sedan to drive civilians out of Kharkiv, the embattled city in eastern Ukraine, a few hours from his hometown, Poltava, where he had grown up in a musical family.It was a grueling routine. Every morning at 6, he drove to Kharkiv, laden with medicine and groceries for those still inside. Every night, he picked up residents fleeing the siege, who could not afford a taxi out. He slept a few hours at home with his parents, then started again.His mother, Olena Ivanchuk, awaited his return each night in silent torment. But on the morning of March 10, his mother had to speak: While dusting, she noticed the family’s religious icons had all fallen from the table, which she perceived as a dark omen.“When I told him, his face fell,” she said. “For the first time in my life, I told him: ‘My son, I fear maybe this time you won’t return.’”He left for Kharkiv anyway.Mr. Ivanchuk chose to aid the war effort by helping residents flee from Kharkiv. He was shot three weeks into the war.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesThat night, Mr. Ivanchuk and his passengers packed his Lada to the brim with suitcases and pets. It was pitch black as they made their way out of town. Through the darkness, bullets suddenly whizzed past.In a terrifying game of cat and mouse, Mr. Ivanchuk sped along, trying to find the protection of a Ukrainian military checkpoint. But the Russian forces soon found their mark: 30 bullets hit the car. Five hit Mr. Ivanchuk.“I felt each and every bullet. First it hit one leg, then the leg once more. Then I saw my fingers destroyed,” he said. “After that, I felt a bullet in my side and back.”Four people and two cats were inside the car. Yet only Mr. Ivanchuk had been shot.He likely would not have survived if not for one of his passengers, Viktoria Fostorina — a doctor. With the help of the others in the car, she bandaged the wounds on his chest and back, preventing a collapsed lung.“At first, I was the one saving them,” he said. “But as it turned out, in the end, they saved me.”Somehow, he managed to drive the car to a Ukrainian military checkpoint before collapsing.The war was three weeks old; Mr. Ivanchuk had already rescued 100 people. As he felt himself losing consciousness in the hospital later, he prayed to God, and prepared to die.“I was thinking, ‘You’re only 29, and you’re dying,” he said, recalling his thoughts. “‘I could have lived longer. But I tried to help people, so maybe it’s a good thing.’”After searching for Mr. Ivanchuk for nearly two days, his mother found him at the Kharkiv hospital, where doctors warned he might not survive. She forced back tears, entering the room of her unconscious son with a smile.“I said, ‘Please, son, open your eyes.’ I told him: ‘One hundred percent, you’ll survive. You will live.’ I told him that several times.”An X-ray showing Mr. Ivanchuk’s hand injuries.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesMr. Ivanchuk remembers awakening to her smiling face. But he couldn’t speak: Tubes were coming out of his mouth. His body was in such pain, he could communicate only by twitching one finger.Ms. Ivanchuk recalled her son’s crying from the pain of his early operations. Later, his tears came from his realization he might never perform again.But fate stepped in once more.Mr. Ivanchuk’s story spread on social media, and a prominent Ukrainian opera singer convinced a talented surgeon in the country to operate on him. His lungs and liver began to heal.Though his recovery had begun, a dark struggle was still ahead, one he almost lost.For weeks, he lay among shellshocked young soldiers who sometimes jumped out of bed at night, throwing imaginary grenades, screaming at comrades to take cover.Mr. Ivanchuk grew paranoid that Russian spies lurked behind every door. And he grappled with the idea that rescuing people had cost him his dream.“It was a marathon of pain and psychological torment,” he said.He faced down those thoughts, thanks in part by drawing on lessons from his past struggle with depression. Psychotherapy during the pandemic had taught him to see his thoughts as brain chemistry, not his inner self. And he began to accept that faith alone could not heal him: “I still believe in the Creator — but a lot depends on us.”Mr. Ivanchuk playing the organ in the church hospital. The movement helps exercise his injured fingers.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesKeeping his goals confined to his hospital room, Mr. Ivanchuk and his mother celebrated even the tiniest step toward recovery. Taking life day by day, and forgetting his big ambitions, he was surprised to discover he felt more content than before the attack.“I used to think that without a dream, it was impossible to be a happy person,” he said. “But now, I see that happiness is actually just to live.”Once stable enough for travel, Mr. Ivanchuk was sent to Ulm, Germany, for advanced surgeries at a German military hospital.As a musician, he wanted to restore as much dexterity as possible to his mutilated fingers — he has played the bandura, a Ukrainian stringed folk instrument, since childhood.He tried not to think about opera until one night, on his third week in Ulm, when he began to sing in the shower. He chose Valentin’s aria from “Faust” — and was astounded to hear his old voice.Mr. Ivanchuk soon realized that not only were his dreams still possible — but that, in a wholly unanticipated twist to his nearly fatal injury, he was now better placed to pursue them.If not for the attack, he would have remained stuck in Ukraine. Moreover, he had landed in Germany, the best place in the world for a budding opera singer. Thanks to its subsidies for the arts, Germany has over 80 full-time opera houses.By late June, he was well enough to perform for the hospital staff.Mr. Ivanchuk greeting the hospital staff after he performed for the first time since he was wounded.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesFirst, he sang “Ave Maria,” for its spirituality. Then, an aria from “The Magic Flute,” by Mozart, to honor his German caretakers. The third song could only be Ukrainian and a tribute to the woman devoted to his survival — “My Own Mother.”She cried as he began. “I did not expect he could sing that loudly,” she said. “It is because he was doing it with his heart.”That evening, he was discharged.“He was extremely positive, he didn’t complain at all about his situation,” said Dr. Benedikt Friemert, the head orthopedic surgeon at the hospital, describing his patient’s recovery. “Quite the opposite: He was convinced that what he had done was right. He was unlucky and got injured, but he said: ‘Never mind, I’ll get better so that I can do what’s important to me.’ In other words: singing.”Mr. Ivanchuk, with a slight limp, a missing finger and a body peppered with bullet fragments, still faces a difficult journey. He has more physiotherapy ahead.He now rents an apartment in Ulm with his mother, and he has started receiving lessons from a Ukrainian opera singer, Maryna Zubko, who works at the local theater. One day, they hope to sing together there.“He has a beautiful voice,” said Ms. Zubko, who first encountered her pupil when a heavily bandaged man threw flowers at her feet after a local performance.Her hope for Mr. Ivanchuk is to spend a year recovering with her help then use his talent, and his story, to earn a place at a prestigious program in Europe or the United States to finish his training.He is dreaming again of the Met and La Scala. “I think in five years, I could make it onto one of those stages,” Mr. Ivanchuk said. “As long as no one else shoots me.” More

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    ‘This is Going to Hurt’ Finds Dark Humor on the Maternity Ward

    “This Is Going to Hurt,” a dramedy starring Ben Whishaw, kindled debate in Britain about hospital care for pregnant women and the pressures on doctors.LONDON — In December 2010, Adam Kay was working on a British maternity ward helping a more junior doctor to perform a cesarean section. Kay had successfully delivered well over 1,200 babies, but this operation was a disaster.The mother had an undiagnosed condition affecting the placenta, and she should not have been allowed to go into labor. The doctors only just managed to save her life — she lost 12 liters of blood — but they couldn’t save the baby.“You want healthy mum plus healthy baby, and it was the first time I’d had neither of those things and was the most senior person in the room,” Kay said in a recent interview. He said that he had felt traumatized but that the reaction from the hospital “was like I’d sprained my ankle or something.”Adam Kay, who created the show and wrote the book it is based on, said its central character was supposed to be reprehensible.Charlie CliftAfter that incident, Kay left medicine. A scene revisiting the operation does not appear in “This Is Going to Hurt,” a medical drama written by Kay and starring Ben Whishaw that premieres on AMC+ and Sundance Now on Thursday after being a hit in Britain. But plenty of other episodes from his six years of working in hospitals do, in fictionalized form.Given that the show tries to show the reality of life on a maternity ward, some moments are harrowing. But many are also funny, including a moment when Whishaw’s character, an overstressed and underpaid doctor called Adam, has to retrieve, from inside a woman, a toy egg containing an engagement ring — the woman had inserted it as a surprise for her boyfriend.The show was commissioned shortly after Kay published a warts-and-all collection of diaries (called “This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor”) documenting his life in British hospitals. That collection, released in 2017, sold more than 2.5 million copies and was translated into 37 languages.Kay described the book as a “confidence trick,” where silly anecdotes were used to sell a book that contained serious comments about health care and about how politicians treat doctors and nurses (it was published the year after doctors in England went on strike over working conditions). The book’s success led to Kay’s meeting Matt Hancock, the British health minister at the time, to push for more funding for doctors in need, and to his writing columns in newspapers.Kay said that the current health minister, Sajid Javid, had also sent a note, saying that his wife liked the book. Kay’s reaction, he said, was to wonder about the minister, “Have you read it? It’s you who needs to read it.”Whishaw and Michele Austin, who plays a midwife in the show. Anika Molnar/AMCDespite his prominence, when “This Is Going to Hurt” appeared on the BBC in February, Kay didn’t get a universally positive reaction. Milli Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement, which tries to combat negative ideas around giving birth; and some users of Mumsnet, an influential parenting website, labeled both Kay and Whishaw’s acerbic character misogynist for mocking women in his care. There was also criticism over the absence of pregnant people’s voices in the show, while Hill said that the birthing scenes would be unpleasant to watch for anyone expecting a baby or who had gone through a traumatic birth.Sitting in a London hotel bar recently, Kay, 41, seemed confused by those responses. “I heard criticism that the show should be about mums,” he said. “But that’s someone else’s program. I’m a bloke who used to be a doctor.”Whishaw’s character was also meant to be reprehensible, Kay added — a doctor so under pressure that his life falls apart, affecting others around him. Once a few episodes had aired, Kay said, the public debate changed and he started getting emails from doctors thanking him for raising awareness of the mental health struggles that medics can face.The show wasn’t really about the ward at all, Kay said, but about the pressures doctors are under at work, including unsustainable hours, bullying bosses and patients, low pay and often disintegrating home lives — with little way out. Whishaw’s character can be seen as passing his troubling behaviors onto a colleague, Shruti (Ambika Mod), a younger doctor meant to be under his wing.Those mental strains are still “a taboo topic” in many hospitals, Kay said. “Doctors are not meant to get ill, and they’re specifically not meant to get mentally ill,” he noted, adding that a doctor dies by suicide every three weeks in Britain.The pressure on doctors in the country is only getting worse, he added. There is a severe shortage of workers in the N.H.S. — the service has around 100,000 vacancies — and staff were already suffering burnout long before the pandemic. “When I left, I was a total outlier, as no one ever stopped being a doctor,” Kay said. “Now everyone’s got one eye on the exit sign as the workload feels absolutely unsustainable.”Ambika Mod plays Shruti, a younger doctor on the maternity ward. Mod said that she received a “crash course” in obstetrics and gynecology before filming.Anika Molnar/AMCDespite the message at its heart, Kay and the show’s two lead actors — Whishaw and Mod — said in interviews that the series was a joy to make. Whishaw said in an email that when he got the script it immediately “rang out with a truth.” The dark comedy “was exactly the type of humor people use when faced with awful things,” he added, “and I liked the awkward, flawed, troubled person at the center of it.”Mod, in her first major role, said that the two actors received a “crash course” in obstetrics and gynecology before filming, including learning how to deliver babies with forceps and how to perform cesarean sections. On set, real doctors, scrub nurses and anesthetists appeared as extras, she added, while prosthetics helped give the show its realism.She said that she was surprised by viewers who called the show’s operations gory and intense in posts on social media. “I didn’t think about that at all when we were filming as we would just be surrounded by pools of blood and amniotic fluid talking about what we were going to have for lunch,” she said.Kay said that, despite the show’s focus being on Britain’s health service, he hoped it would touch a nerve in the United States, too. He imagines that “a labor ward’s a labor ward, wherever it is,” he said. After his book came out in 2017, he got messages from doctors in countries including Chad, Belarus and Venezuela, he added, saying that the themes also rang true for practitioners in those countries.“This Is Going to Hurt” was written as a one-off series, and Kay said that he had no plans to do a follow-up. He knew he would hit his “shelf life as a writer” at some point, he said, and when that happened, he expected to return to medicine, to teach or to try and change health policy.“I’ve got a lot of guilt about leaving,” Kay said. “Obviously, I believe the arts have enormous value, but you’d have to have quite some ego as a writer to think it was anything other than 10 steps away from saving someone’s life in an operation.” More

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    He’s a Doctor. He’s an Actor. He’s an Indie Heartthrob.

    Actors have a long history of indulging in side projects: Some use their off time to write books, while others even front rock bands. But it’s fair to say that few thespians navigate a dual career quite like Anders Danielsen Lie, who currently stars as a lingering love interest in both “Bergman Island” and “The Worst Person in the World” — an indie-film doubleheader that prompted one critic to dub him “the art house’s next great ex-boyfriend” — while still working full-time as a doctor in Oslo.“It’s been overwhelming,” Lie, 43, told me over a recent video chat, and he wasn’t kidding: In early January, he was named best supporting actor by the National Society of Film Critics even as he worked three days a week at a vaccination center in Oslo and two days a week as a general practitioner. “It feels kind of abstract because as an actor, the most important part of making a movie is the shoot itself,” he said. “Then, when the film is coming out, it’s kind of a surreal experience.”Expect things to get even more surreal as the acclaimed “The Worst Person in the World” finally makes its way into American theaters on Feb. 4. In this romantic dramedy from the director Joachim Trier, Renate Reinsve — who won the best-actress prize for the role at the Cannes Film Festival — stars as Julie, a young 20-something trying to figure out her future. For some time, she takes up with Lie’s character, Aksel, an older, charismatic comic-book artist, and adopts his settled life as her own. But even when they break up and Julie discovers new pursuits, she finds her bond with the cocksure Aksel hard to shake.Lie with Renate Reinsve in “The Worst Person in the World”Kasper Tuxen, via Sundance InstituteLie previously collaborated with Trier on the well-reviewed films “Reprise” (2008) and “Oslo, August 31” (2012), but “The Worst Person in the World” has proved to be something of a breakthrough: Already, the internet has crafted video tributes to his character, and the film has struck a chord with audiences who prefer simple, human stakes to superhuman ones. “It felt like we made a very local thing from Oslo, and we were afraid if anybody else in the world would understand,” Lie said. “But people on the other side of the planet can identify with it. That’s what is so nice about feature films, they kind of bring people together.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.With Aksel and Julie, it feels like the qualities that drew them to each other eventually drive them apart. How would you sum up their relationship?He’s good at articulating her emotions and thoughts, and that’s something she probably wanted at an earlier stage in their relationship, but at this point, she’s just annoyed by it. He’s a pretty kind person, but he is also, in a subtle way, trying to dominate her by using language as his tool, because that’s what he’s good at.Is Aksel a “bad boyfriend,” as a recent Vanity Fair article asserted?I don’t see him as a bad boyfriend at all, actually. She’s not bad; he’s not bad; they’re just human. They are put in situations where they have to make hard choices and end up feeling like the worst people in the world, but it’s not really their fault. It’s life’s fault, in a way.In the film, we watch Julie swipe between different identities, trying on new jobs, new passions. Did you act the same way at that age?I personally thought that my 20s and 30s were hard, tough years, because I spent so much time trying to figure out who I was and what to do. I still haven’t made that choice, but that doesn’t bother me so much anymore. I’m happy enough to have two kids and a wife. Maybe it’s as simple as that.When you were younger, did you feel pressure to make an ultimate choice between acting and medicine?This has been my ongoing identity crisis.Lie is the son of an actress and a doctor who “ended up being both!” he said. “I probably should go into psychoanalysis or something.”David B. Torch for The New York TimesMaybe that’s just the bifurcated life you feel most suited to.It’s definitely a bifurcated life, and sometimes it feels like an identity crisis because it’s just a lot of hustle making the calendar work out. It’s hard to combine those two occupations, and sometimes I also wonder a little bit who I am. I’m trying to think that I’m something deeper than that: I’m not the doctor or the actor, I’m someone else, and these are just roles that I go into.Your mother is an actress. Did that affect the way you regard an actor’s life?My mother is not the typical actress — she’s not a diva or anything like that. She’s a very ordinary person, and I think it’s important to have a foot in reality if you want to portray people onscreen with confidence and credibility. But I’ve grown up seeing how it is to be an actress and how it is to be a doctor, and ended up being both! I probably should go into psychoanalysis or something.Your father was a doctor. That pretty much split you right down the middle, doesn’t it?Exactly. Maybe it’s an inheritable disease.Does one career inform the other?Working as an actor has improved my communication skills as a doctor because acting is so much about listening to the other actors and trying to establish good communication, often with people that you don’t know very well, and that reminds me a little bit of working as a doctor. I meet people, often for the first time, and they present a very private problem to me, and I have to get the right information to help them. It’s a very delicate, hard communication job, actually.“I have, many times, asked myself why I keep doing this, because I’m very neurotic as a person,” Lie said. David B. Torch for The New York TimesYou made your film debut when you were 11 in a film called “Herman.” How did that come about?My mother had worked with the director, so she knew he was searching for a boy my age, and she asked if I was interested in doing an audition. I didn’t really know what I had signed up for — I was 10 years old, and it felt like just a game that we were playing. I remember when the director wanted me to do the part, he came to our house with flowers and said, “Congratulations,” and I was frightened because I realized, “Now I really have to play that role and deliver.” For the first time, I felt this anxiety of not doing a good job, the exact same feeling I can get now in front of a shoot that really matters to me. I can be scared of not rising to the occasion.After that film, you didn’t work again as an actor for 16 years.“Herman” was an overwhelming experience. I felt like I was playing with explosives. I was dealing with emotions and manipulating my psyche in a way that was kind of frightening.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More