Natalia
On February 24, 2022 Natalia woke up at 5 a.m. in order to walk her dog as per her normal daily routine. She did not check the news that morning, so she was unaware that Russians had started an all-out war against Ukraine. She lived in Kherson, a southern town bordering Crimea, a Ukrainian territory, which had been annexed by Russia in 2014. Russians had used it as a launch pad to attack Ukraine from the south on that day in February. In the meantime, Natalia continued with her daily routine – after walking her dog, she had a breakfast, jumped into her car, and drove to work. She still did not listen to the news then.
Once she joined the main road, she was immediately stuck in a huge traffic jam. Something was up – “Is that a road traffic accident?”.
She finally reached her place of work, which was a big regional tertiary hospital. A usually quiet place at that time of the morning, it looked hectic – people were running around, the police and security staff were everywhere. It was only then that Natalia found out about the war. Russians had bombed their local airport earlier and were moving towards the city from Crimea.
The first 5 wounded soldiers arrived at midday. They all needed to go to operating theatres for urgent surgeries. Everybody seemed to be prepared by then and worked well together. There were no unnecessary delays, and everyone was in their place, doing their job to the best of their abilities. On that first day, they all worked non-stop till the following morning. In 24 hours, they admitted 38 Ukrainian soldiers, two of which were in agony when they came in and died very quickly shortly afterwards. All the remaining 36 survived. All the soldiers were young boys 18-20 years of age, except for 5, who were mature men in their 40s. All their six operating theatres were busy non-stop, while they had 19 patients in their 12-bedded Intensive Care Unit. Natalia remembers how well they all worked together on that day. Nobody had any time to dwell on what was happening outside the hospital. They were all doing the job that they were trained to do to the best of their abilities among the colleagues, who were all looking in the same direction. They were trying to save the lives and limbs of those soldiers, who had been first to stand up against the enemy that had come to take their land, and their very identity. Nobody seemed to pay attention to distant explosions lighting up the sky at night, to air raid sirens – to any external distractions. They were all present in the moment, and nothing seemed impossible on that first night.
Natalia remembered about her dog at 7 a.m. on the following day and ran home to take her out for a walk, as well as to take a quick nap. She then came back to work and carried on for a few more days, living in the hospital and going back home twice daily to take her dog out for quick walks. On the 1st of March she took her dog with her, and they stayed in the hospital most of the time from then on, occasionally going home overnight. It was much safer to stay at the hospital than elsewhere. Also, the hospital had its own bomb shelter.
They carried on admitting Ukrainian soldiers till the 1st of March. Then, things changed suddenly – the Ukrainian Army decided to retreat from the city to spare the lives of its soldiers in the face of an overwhelming enemy force. No further admissions of military personnel were taking place after March the 1st. Those already in the hospital were evacuated discretely and efficiently before Russians arrived into the city.
One of the soldiers, who was shot in the head
One of many bullets extracted from bodies of wounded soldiers
From February the 28th, the Police disappeared from the streets; from March the 1st the city was left with no authorities, there was complete lawlessness. Natalia stayed in the hospital at that time, only leaving to check on her apartment for very quick trips.
From March the 2nd, it was only civilians who were being admitted to the hospital, including those who had signed up to fight as volunteers in the few territorial army battalions, after the regular army units had retreated. There was resistance, and local street fights till the 5th of March, when the city finally fell into the hands of Russians.
No organized evacuation had been offered to the hospital staff. Some had chosen to leave the city before Russians came; however, the majority stayed. They saw it as their duty to stay and take care of their countrymen and women. Natalia made a pact with herself that she was staying for as long as they had Ukrainian hospital management. Most of her colleagues felt the same way as her.
Life under the Russian occupation was proving tough. Initially, all the shops were closed, and people were getting by on whatever they had stored at home. Then, some shops did re-open, but there were huge food lines – one could easily spend 5-6 hours in a queue for a carton of milk. There were spontaneous street markets, where people were bartering, and trading food and daily necessities.
A curfew was introduced – people were not allowed outside from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. Russian soldiers were roaming through the city in armoured vehicles searching for Ukrainian military, and resistance fighters. At night, there were frequent sounds of automatic gun fire around the city.
A view from a hospital window on a typical night under Russian occupation
In the hospital, they were still just about managing to continue working using their own supplies of medical disposables, and medicines. There was some humanitarian aid being delivered by volunteers, but that was drying out too. They continued treating civilians as best as they could trying to use their sparse resources to the best of their abilities.
One of the most memorable episodes, a patient that Natalia remembers the most out of all the horrible injuries, and life stories that she had to deal with at that time, was a six-year-old boy who was shot in the head while his family was trying to escape from the city in the early days of the occupation. There were no “green corridors”, no safe escape routes out of the city. The family just decided to take their chances. There were three people in the car – the boy, and his parents. As they were passing through the city some Russians just shot at them indiscriminately from a very short range. They clearly saw who was inside the car. The father died instantly, the boy received a bullet into his head, the mother was completely unscathed. Natalia and her colleagues were trying to resuscitate the boy for an hour and a half, much longer after it was clear how futile it was. That episode affected everybody deeply. The mother had to be sedated on their intensive care for three days afterwards. She lost everything that night. Natalia says that she saw the real face of the war, the kind of enemy that they were dealing with on that night.
During those days, medical staff grew very close to each other. They all became like a family. They would start every day at 7:45 with a communal morning coffee before having a meeting and heading into theatres. Everyone was constantly making sure that their colleagues were OK. If someone had gone home for a short break, and would not have been answering their phone, their colleague would have gone to their house, and shout their name outside their apartment block, then knock on their door if they were not answering. It was particularly hard when both internet and mobile connection disappeared altogether after Russians had destroyed Ukrainian mobile towers, and disrupted cable networks. People were gathering outside bigger shops, and government buildings trying to get some signal to call their friends and family. On the other hand, people finally disconnected from their devices, and started spending more time talking to each other, being present. Also, they started reading books, and discussing them rather than talking about some latest Netflix series.
Natalia in an operating theatre on one of those nights
On the 20th of June, Russians came to the hospital, and took away their Medical Director. They brought him back in the evening and he looked a broken man. As Natalia discovered later, he had been being blackmailed in the three months prior to that date. He had been resisting, but finally gave up, and signed the papers allowing Russian authorities to take a full control over the hospital. He said he was sorry, that he had three kids living in the hospital, that they had gotten to him through direct threats to his family.
That was the last straw for Natalia, and most of her colleagues. All the 22 anesthesiologists, except for four who were about to retire; all the trauma surgeons, all the neurosurgeons decided to leave on that day. Natalia did her last on on-call night shift and left at 5:30 in the morning with her three other colleagues and the dog in one car. There were two other cars with her colleagues inside them in their small column. It was scary, but they were convinced that that was their only option. They were burning down the bridges.
They managed to get out of the city unharmed and headed towards the Ukrainian territory. Passing Russian checkpoints was scary as Natalia was convinced that they might have had lists of doctors, with orders to stop them from running away. Luckily, that was not the case – they passed through all the checkpoints unharmed, reaching the final one at the dividing line between the two warring sides. It was late afternoon, and plus 45 degrees outside. There was a big queue at the border crossing, which was open from 5 to 8 in the evening. There were already late on that day, so they made their way into a nearby village. There, they managed to get a parking space in somebody’s house. There was a fence, and gates so they felt safer than they would have done if they had had to park in the street. They slept inside their cars that night, and left at 5 in the morning to be the first in the queue at the checkpoint on the border crossing, which was opening at 5 p.m. They did make it that time and crossed the border uneventfully.
Natalia remembers that everyone in the car had been keeping quiet throughout their journey, and up to the point that they reached the final checkpoint. Once they crossed it, she and the other girl who was in the car burst into tears, while the two men finally broke the silence. All of them just carried on talking non-stop throughout the remainder of their journey. They were hugging and kissing Ukrainian soldiers that they were meeting on their way, who kept asking if they were OK. They were just euphoric, and happy to have made it out alive.
The Kherson anaesthetic team after their lucky escape from the occupied territory
They finally reached Zaporizhzhia at 11 in the evening that day. From there, they all headed in different directions. Natalia ended up in Dnipro – her mother lived there. In fact, they had moved there in 2014 after the Russian occupation of the Eastern Ukraine where they had been living at the time. This was the second time Natalia had to move from a Russian-occupied territory.
She now works at a large regional centre among a great company of competent, and supportive colleagues. She enjoys her work, particularly the fact that she is making a difference treating wounded Ukrainian soldiers who defend her beloved Ukraine.
With her beloved dog Noa in Dnipro