‘We can’t stop treatment, not even for an hour’

After a Russian missile hit Ukraine’s top children’s hospital, medical staff rushed to save their patients. One doctor tells her story.

During a deadly Russian missile barrage on Kyiv on July 8, Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital suffered a direct hit. More than 600 patients and at least that many medical staff were inside the Okhmatdyt Hospital at the time of the strike, which killed two adults and injured more than 50 people, including seven children. Another child who was evacuated from the hospital later died. In the aftermath of the strike, Meduza interviewed Anna Brudna, a doctor in Okhmatdyt’s bone marrow transplant division who was at the hospital at the time of the attack. Here’s what she saw.

Over the next several days, all donations to Let’s Help (a fundraiser cofounded by Meduza to support Ukrainian civilians who have suffered from Russia’s war) will go towards supporting Okhmatdyt Hospital in Kyiv, Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital.

Anna Brudna was working in an on-call room when she heard the first explosion. A colleague suggested that everyone move to the corridor in case the windows got blown out. But Brudna didn’t listen; as a doctor in the bone marrow transplant division at Kyiv’s Okhmatydyt children’s hospital, she had too much work to do.

“The patients we prep for transplants are hooked up to machines and kept on IVs in sterile isolation rooms — if we ran off somewhere every time there’s an air raid alert, we simply wouldn’t be able to treat anyone,” Brudna told Meduza.

The sound of explosions drew closer and the doctors began moving patients out of the wards and into the corridor. Then, Brudna said, it was as if an earthquake hit: there was a loud noise and the walls shook. The department chief came in and said to quickly move patients to the parking garage and the basement, which doubles as the hospital’s bomb shelter.

Brudna went out into the corridor and saw all of the ceiling tiles scattered on the floor. “The shock wave had turned everything upside down,” she said.

‘An IV is like life itself’

The hospital staff immediately began evacuating patients. Junior nurses had pieces of shrapnel pulled out of them and then went right back to work. The blast had shattered the glass in all of the isolation rooms. Two doctors rushed out of a conference room seconds before one of its walls collapsed.

The elevators weren’t working, so there was no choice but to take the stairs. “Mothers and nursing staff helped patients go down the stairs — including children who had [previously] lost limbs due to Russian shelling, bedridden children from the blood cancer ward, and children in wheelchairs,” Brudna recalled.

“Downstairs, we saw a mother who was holding her child in her arms and crying very hard. Her child was on the operating table at the time of the attack. As soon as we heard the explosion, the power immediately went out — and [trying] to finish a surgery in such conditions…” Brudna trailed off. “She didn’t know what would happen to him.”

Brudna helped evacuate bone marrow transplant patients who were hooked up to IV drips, including children undergoing chemotherapy. “Our patients are children without their own blood cell production and immune systems. So they are put on respirators; they need blood and platelet transfusions so they don’t die of anemia. They simply don’t produce their own blood cells during the treatment period,” the doctor explained. “For a cancer patient, an IV is like life [itself].”

“Patients who are undergoing transfusions usually don’t leave the isolation room,” she continued. “Because of [this] terrorist attack, our children breathed in smoke, dirt, and dust, [and] came into contact with other patients. These are incredibly bad conditions [for them].”

Some of the patients suffered dizzy spells, headaches, and vomiting during the evacuation. The bone marrow transplant division’s staff knew they had to resume treatment right away.

“We calculated the medications we needed for the week ahead, loaded the children onto a bus and went to another hospital where the nurses immediately resumed all treatment processes,” Brudna told Meduza. “We can’t stop [treatment], not even for an hour. So we have four bone marrow transplants planned for this week — and we’re going to perform all of them according to the schedule drawn up before the terrorist attack.”

‘Now our patients are scattered’

Russia’s missile strike on Okhmatdyt killed two adults, including one of the hospital’s doctors — a kidney specialist named Svetlana Lukyanchuk. According to Brudna, Lukyanchuk was in another building that was completely destroyed in the strike.

This isn’t the first Okhmatdyt has lost one of its doctors in a Russian attack. On October 10, 2022, a Russian missile strike killed pediatric hematologist Oksana Leontieva while she was on her way to work. “It was morning, we were taking over the shift from the nurses [and] the air raid siren was already howling,” Brudna recalled. “Oksana wrote in the department’s group chat that she was running late, because [...] she had to take [her son] Hryhorii to her parents’ house. This was our last message from her.”

“At noon, I saw our nurse very upset and in tears, and I found out from her that Oksana was dead. We hugged each other [and] she kept asking me if it was a mistake. But then our [department] chief, Oleksandr Lysytsia, sent a photo to the work chat of Oksana’s burnt-out car. This photo was taken by her father.”

After the July 8 strike on Okhmatdyt, Brudna and her colleagues tried to assess the damage to the hospital itself. The damage to its new building, which opened in 2020 after extensive renovations, will take at least several months to repair, Ukrainian Health Minister Viktor Liashko said on July 10.

“Our department is located on the [new building’s] third floor: the blast wave tore out the ceilings, ripped out wires, and destroyed the water supply systems. In other words, there’s no water and the first floors are also flooded,” Brudna told Meduza. “Higher up — in the operating rooms and the intensive care units — expensive equipment was damaged. How can we work?”

The hospital’s toxicology ward, where children were undergoing dialysis at the time of the strike, was completely destroyed. “[The doctors] there helped restore kidney function to children from all over Ukraine — they literally lived in this ward,” Brudna said.

The intensive care unit, which housed children who cannot survive without ventilators, was completely destroyed as well, she added. “Now our patients are scattered across many hospitals in Kyiv and even [throughout] Ukraine. But I don’t know many places [with such state-of-the-art equipment] — there’s a chance that someone will need a treatment that he won’t be able to get.”

* * *

When Brudna spoke to Meduza on Tuesday, workers were still clearing the rubble at the Okhmatdyt Hospital. Medical staff won’t be able to go back to work there until its infrastructure is fully repaired, she said. “Even if one department is restored completely, we can’t work without the others! For us to be able to continue transplant work, the entire hospital must be functioning,” the doctor emphasized.

Brudna believes that Russia’s attacks on civilian targets aim to “intimidate, break, and force [Ukrainians] into negotiations.” “We’ve become ready for anything. You understand that your life can end — maybe even today — but this doesn't take away your desire to live and to fight,” she said.

“We’ve gotten used to the air raid sirens — and we stay in the hospital even when there’s incoming strikes on the city. I’ve almost stopped crying (and when I have absolutely no strength left, I start laughing hysterically). When we say goodbye to our colleagues, instead of ‘see you later,’ we say, ‘If something happens to me, then you know that my patients need this and that.’ We got into this habit after Oksana was killed. And each new strike reinforces it.”

Brudna hopes that Western countries will listen to Ukrainians and treat their experiences as a reason for “real action and not just expressions of sympathy and concern.” “I’m grateful for the aid and attention, but I would like for some mechanism to be found to influence Russia so that this stops,” the doctor said. “So I don’t have to give interviews like this one, you know?”

On Wednesday, Health Minister Liashko reported that a little boy who was in critical condition in Okhmatdyt’s ICU at the time of the missile strike had died at another Kyiv hospital. As of this writing, the death toll from Russia’s attack stands at three: one doctor, one parent, and one child.

Interview by Lilia Yapparova

Written for Meduza-in-English by Eilish Hart