KYIV, Ukraine – The National Cancer Institute in Kiev was busier than usual after a Russian missile hit The largest children’s hospital in Ukraine this week, forcing the evacuation of dozens of its young patients battling cancer.
Russia’s heaviest shelling of the Ukrainian capital in four months severely damaged the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital on Monday, terrorizing families and seriously affecting their children who were already battling potentially fatal illnesses.
Now, some families face the dilemma of where to continue their children’s treatment.
Oksana Halak only found out about her 2-year-old son Dmytro’s diagnosis – acute lymphoblastic leukemia – at the beginning of June. She immediately decided to treat him in Okhmatdyt, “because it is one of the best hospitals in Europe”.
She and Dmytro were in the hospital for treatment when sirens sounded across the city. They couldn’t rush to the shelter because the boy was on an IV. “It is vitally important not to stop these IVs,” Halak said.
After the first explosions, nurses helped transfer them to another, safer, windowless room.
“We felt a powerful shock wave. We felt the room shake and the lights go out,” she recalled. “We understood it was close, but we didn’t think it was in Okhmatdyt.”
Shortly afterwards, they were evacuated to the National Cancer Institute, and now Dmytro is one of 31 patients who, in the midst of a difficult fight against cancer, need to adapt to a new hospital. With his arrival, the number of children undergoing cancer treatment doubled.
Dmytro and the other patients have been offered evacuation to hospitals abroad, and Halak wants their further treatment to be in Germany.
“We understand that with our situation we cannot receive the help we should and are forced to request evacuation abroad,” she said.
Other hospitals in the city that welcomed children for treatment faced similar overcrowding following the closure of Okhmatdyt, where hundreds of children were being treated at the time of the attack.
“The destroyed Okhmatdyt is the pain of the entire nation,” said the director general of the National Cancer Institute, Olena Yefimenko.
Almost immediately after the attack, messages began circulating on social media to raise money to restore the hospital. Many parents whose children were treated there wrote messages of gratitude, saying their children survived due to the hospital’s care despite difficult diagnoses. In just three days, Ukrainians and private companies raised more than $7.3 million through the national fundraising platform UNITED24.
Reconstruction works at the hospital are already underway. Okhmatdyt’s doctors balance their duties treating their young evacuated patients while working to reopen the children’s hospital. But even with resources and determination, this can take months.
Even so, Yuliia Vasylenko has already decided that her 11-year-old son Denys will remain in Kiev for cancer treatment.
On the day of the attack, the boy, diagnosed with multiple tumors in his spinal cord, was supposed to start chemotherapy. The strike delayed his treatment indefinitely and Denys had to undergo additional examinations and tests, his mother said.
Denys was very scared during the strike, his mother said as she took him in a wheelchair around the National Cancer Institute.
“The last few days have felt like an eternity,” she said. Only now are they slowly recovering from the stress.
“If we go somewhere, with our diagnosis, we will have to redo all the tests from the beginning,” she said, adding that this could take three to four months.
“And we don’t know if we’ll have that time,” she said.
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Associated Press journalist Volodymyr Yurchuk contributed to this report.
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