A government plane landed in Skopje with a young patient on a stretcher. Not for a protocol, not for a delegation - for a spine injured on a slide at a holiday resort in Turkey. This is one of the rare situations where the sentence „the state sent a plane” does not sound like an expense, but like the reason the state has a plane at all.

A patient from Skopje who suffered a severe spinal injury while on holiday in the resort town of Kuşadası was flown home on a government aircraft and admitted to the University Clinic for Traumatology, Orthopaedics, Anaesthesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care - TOARILUC, said its director Igor Merdžanovski.

The injury happened in an accident on a water slide. The patient was operated on 23 July at a hospital in Kuşadası and stayed there until the transfer. The Turkish doctors themselves requested air medical transport because of the severity of the injury.

„Our colleagues asked for the patient to be transported by air because of the severity of the injury and the need for rapid transfer. We are deeply grateful to the government and to the General and Joint Affairs Service, which made the transport possible,” Merdžanovski said.

A medical team led by Dr Marta Treneva, head of the anaesthesia and intensive care clinic, was sent to Turkey to take charge of the patient and accompany him during the flight to Skopje. On landing, he was admitted to the intensive care clinic.

After reviewing the medical documentation, Merdžanovski confirmed that the operation performed in Turkey was satisfactory and well executed, and noted that spinal injuries are among the most serious of all. Further tests and continued rehabilitation are planned, including physical therapy at the country's spinal centre.

This story has a second layer that rarely gets opened. Every summer hundreds of thousands of people from this country travel abroad on holiday, and every summer somebody comes back different from how they left. The difference between this case and the ones that end with a fundraising campaign is who covered the bill for the transport. This time it was the state - and that is exactly why it is worth recording, so people know it can be done.