Childhood oncologist Olena Boldyreva lived and worked at City Clinical Children’s Hospital No. 16 for several months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. On the morning of February 24, she woke up at home to the sounds of explosions.
“Thoughts were focused on one thing: how are the patients doing at the hospital? On that day, there were about 30 children from different regions in the ward – from Luhansk, Donetsk, and Rivne. Parents started calling in panic. At first, there was confusion, but our management quickly organized shelter and arranged operations under these extraordinary conditions. It seemed like the children would panic, cry, but that didn’t happen. There was a command: we took suitcases, phones, chargers, water, and went down to the shelter, and no one cried. Our shelter is well-equipped, it is not a damp basement. Considering that we had two very critical children, we accommodated them well and continued their treatment,” recalls Olena.
In early March of last year, a shell hit the doctor’s home in North Saltivka (Kharkiv). She went to the other side of the city, took food to them, and persuaded them to leave Kharkiv. She returned from Saltivka to Lui Pasteur Street near the Kharkiv Tractor Plant on foot.
After that outing, Olena went home multiple times, from which everyone had left except her and two or three neighbors. She brought groceries to a woman who was constantly with her sick husband. Olena and other professionals lived in the hospital for several months, as transportation was not operating in the city.
“In the first weeks of the war, 180 people – patients and parents – lived in the hospital’s basement, mostly children. Staff members didn’t stay in the shelter all the time, only those treating patients, as there was limited space. Most of them were upstairs, sleeping on mattresses in the auditorium on the first floor,” says Marina Kucherenko, the director of Children’s Hospital No. 16.
In the basement of the medical facility, there were 10 children left.
On March 7th, 35 oncology patients from two Kharkiv hospitals – No. 1 and No. 16 – were evacuated to Lviv. Ambulances were organized, and a special carriage was allocated for the children, accompanied by two doctors from the hematology department. The children were taken to Lviv and later moved to Poland, where patients were distributed to different countries for treatment.
In March of the previous year, 10 children remained in the basement of the medical facility. Their parents did not agree to evacuation. Psychologists took care of the patients all the time. They not only treated them but also entertained them with cartoons, singing, drawing, and playing, so they didn’t just hold onto difficult memories from that time. In the basement, they celebrated the 16th birthdays of two patients, and volunteers brought pizza for the children, organizing a proper celebration.
“Logistics were disrupted, and we didn’t receive the purchased food products and medications. We survived thanks to the tremendous flow of humanitarian aid. The charitable foundation ‘Global 2000’ helped us a lot. There were no functioning pharmacies in the area. One pharmacy that hadn’t closed was near our hospital. We set it up on our territory, and the whole area came here to buy medications. We bought the necessary medications from this pharmacy, and ‘Global 2000’ covered the costs,” says the hospital’s director.
In the spring of 2022, the 16th hospital became a shelter for newborns. They were brought to the medical facility on Lui Pasteur Street after the shelling of the City Perinatal Center.
“One child was in very critical condition with a blood infection. We provided supportive therapy, and now everything is fine with them,” says Olena.
Until the summer of the previous year, 14 doctors lived and worked in the medical facility. They started going home when public transportation and gas stations resumed operation in Kharkiv.
Olena confesses that during those months, she dreamt of simple things like sleeping in her own bed, on her own pillow, in her own pajamas, craving her own space.
“We tried to continue growing, and tried to protect our hospital. We organized our work so that we never stopped. In our department, everyone worked like bees. We continued improving our hospital – they brought us seedlings, and we planted flower beds. We tidied up the surroundings, collected leaves outside in the fall. Despite the difficulties, we not only had tough memories from that time but also positive ones,” notes the doctor.
An ARCHITECT immunochemistry analyzer device from Abbott, gifted by donors, appeared in the hospital. It’s a device for determining the concentration of medicinal substances introduced during high-dose chemotherapy. Previously, patients from the 16th hospital were sent to Kyiv for this procedure.
“Now therapy for our children is much more accessible; we don’t have to send patients anywhere – neither to other clinics in Ukraine nor abroad. We’re currently performing everything except transplantation. We aspire to more. We really want elements of autotransplantation to be available in our clinic. Currently, we also need staff expansion because two doctors work in the 36-bed ward,” Olena explains.
Olena’s dream is to wake up one day to a world without war.
“I wish everyone would return home, so that children would no longer be scared, and life would be even better!” the doctor says.