For amputees, new limbs, new lives
Some soldiers, still traumatized by war, need time to adjust
In all of its decades of service, Truskavets City Hospital, an old medical center serving a city in western Ukraine, never had to specialize in treating amputees. But things change — sometimes in seconds, and with the roar of an incoming rocket.
Now, Truskavets is part of Ukraine’s growing limb-replacement effort, with two of its floors filled to near overflow with soldiers.
Semyon, 27, found his way there by way of Kharkiv, a battleground in the war that began after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Early one morning, he was serving as a radio operator and signalman for an anti-aircraft battery when it came under mortar fire.
By Semyon’s count, his unit was hit 43 times in 20 minutes.
He lost his right leg. “When I was first fitted with the prosthetic leg,” Semyon said, “it was perplexing to understand that this leg is not mine.”
But the staff at Truskavets kept working with him. “Now all is good,” he said. Like many of the soldiers, for privacy, he preferred to give only his first name for publication.
Misha, 27, lost both legs and gained a new nickname. His comrades in a Ukrainian assault brigade had called him “Savage,” but his fellow patients at Truskavets now call him “Acrobat.”
He fought in Kherson, Luhansk and Donetsk, and lost his legs when he was hit by shrapnel during a battle over a river crossing near Bilohorivka, in the Luhansk region. Now, awaiting his prosthetics, he spends his hours in the hospital’s gym.
“Before, I weighed 82,”
he said, using kilograms; in pounds, about 180. “Now, I weigh 10 kilos less.”
Ihor Zobkiv, 22, lost his lower left leg and part of his right foot when his armored personnel carrier hit an antitank barrier in northern Mykolaiv, in the country’s south.
He has been in Truskavets for months, and he has not been idle. Over the summer, he met a young woman while having lunch in a local cafe, and now they plan to marry.
Ihor has other ambitions too. “I plan to continue to serve in the army,” he said.
Even when the war was still young, some in Ukraine already were expecting a surge in the need for prosthetics as amputees began returning from the battlefield.
In the spring, the owner
of a Ukrainian prosthetics factory said he planned to expand production at his factory in Kyiv, moving to double and triple shifts, because the numbers of amputees were already so high.
Serhii Zvyagin, 34, who was wounded in a shelling attack that killed two of his fellow soldiers, is still waiting for his prosthetic to arrive.
The artificial limbs are made and fitted by outside specialists, and as the number of war wounded climbs, delays are not uncommon for that reason too.
Hospitals such as the one in Truskavets not only provide the prosthetics; they also work intensively with wounded soldiers to teach them how to use them.
Vanya, 34, a national park
employee who lost his right hand serving in an infantry assault group in Luhansk, is spending part of his time learning to write with his left one.
“I’m waiting for a prosthesis,” he said. “They offered me a hook, but I’m not ready for that. I hope I will someday get a more modern prosthetic.”
The soldiers who arrive at Truskavets, still traumatized from battle, need more than just medical attention.
When outfitting two floors to handle the orthopedic patients, the hospital also fashioned part of a hallway into a church.
In the months since Truskavets began taking in amputees in March, a small community has formed in its corridors. On any given day, they bustle with not just patients and the medical
staff but family members and soldiers who once served with them.
“Some patients have become friends, and some are like family,” said one of the doctors, Pavlo Kozak.
When a new prosthesis is delivered to the hospital, it can be a big event. Patients crowd around, eager for a look, and sometimes they even pass the artificial limb around for closer inspection — and a glimpse, perhaps, of their own future.
It is not just curiosity. The soldiers were comrades on the field, and they are comrades in the hospital. And so when Semyon was being fitted with a leg in his hospital room for the first time, his wife by his side, his fellow soldiers peered in from the hallway.
They cheered him on as he took his first steps.
Truskavets is not the only hospital working with Ukraine’s war wounded.
A rehabilitation center in Kyiv has been treating soldiers from the defense of Mariupol, one of the bestknown battles in the conflict.
In many ways, it was a fluke of architecture that led the Truskavets hospital to be chosen as a treatment center for war amputees. As a carry-over from the Soviet era of design, what it lacks in grace it makes up for with wide corridors, doorways and bathrooms that make it easier for a wheelchair to navigate.
“Before the war, I was providing procedures and rehabilitation for patients who’d suffered trauma and strokes,” Kozak said. “I had no experience dealing with amputees.”