Brave Marynka just keeps asking why it was her...
“DO YOU know that I no longer have a leg?” It was the first question five-year-old Marynka asked after she regained consciousness.
This beautiful angel with a sweet smile played football and enjoyed riding her scooter before a Russian shell hit the room where she was hiding with her parents. Her leg was torn off.
Her mother Natalia says their city, Kherson, was occupied by Russians on the second week of the war and they lived without electricity, gas, telephone and internet connection.
There was no basement, so they all hid in the central room, but the shell flew through the roof.there were eight people in the room – Marynka and Natalia suffered the most.
Marynka’s grandfather pulled her from the rubble but their local hospital had been bombed by Russians and the family had to travel to another one in Kryvyi Rih, 25 miles away.
As they made their way through the shelling, Marynka “lost consciousness several times and the car was fired on at the military checkpoints but they managed to escape”, a doctor at the hospital recalls.
The limb had to be amputated above the knee. “Now Marynka closes her eyes while we are changing bandages. Not from the pain – she doesn’t want to look at her leg,” says the doctor.
The tragedy happened in May but for many months Marynka was too upset to get out of bed.
She was separated from her mother who was recovering in another hospital, so the child was looked after by her auntie Liuba. Since then the team of psychologists and rehabilitation doctors have worked hard to make Marynka want to live again. At the end of the summer she was given a prosthetic training leg and then a new personal one was created.
They named the leg Kesha, and now the family are trying to accept the new reality.
The rehabilitation doctor, Nazar, said: “It often happens that the brain sends Marynka false signals, for example knee pain that isn’t there. We scratched the knee, laughed and the pain disappeared.” Psychologists are doing their best to support Marynka.they try to motivate her with photos of other people with a prosthesis but there is still a long way to acceptance.
Marynka constantly asks why she was the one who got hurt.
As a mother myself I found it especially difficult to write Marynka’s story. My youngest daughter is five. It is hard to look at the pain and suffering inflicted on Marynka and so many children like her but I did it so the world would know the truth about the atrocities Russians are committing against my people.
‘Hard to look at the suffering’